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The Northward Course 
of Empire 



BY 

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
DR. EDWARD WILLIAM NELSON 

CHIEF OF THE UNITED STATES BIOLOGICAL SURVEY 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND A MAP 



i 



NEW YORK 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 






COPTBIGHT, 1922, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 



PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. 

AUG 26 i922 

©CI.A681520 



Ui- 



A number of these chapters appeared as articles 
in the World's Work and the National Geographic 
Magazine. 



Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive 
in 2011 witii funding from 
Tine Library of Congress 



littp://www.arcliive.org/details/nortliwardGourseo01stef 



PEEFACE 

The idea of this book is doubtless old, though it 
came to me only about 1912. Perhaps it was old to 
the Medes and Persians. It may even have been an 
ancient revamping of it that led Solomon to remark 
that there is nothing new under the sun. 

In another sense the idea is so new that the history 
of it can be given briefly. 

The winter of 1918-1919 representatives of chambers 
of commerce of various European countries were tour- 
ing the United States. A dinner was given them in 
JSTew York and at this I was called upon to make a 
five-ininute talk. One of the sponsors of the dinner 
was Dr. Albert Shaw, the editor of the Review of 
Reviews. He said to me that the idea of my talk was 
new. When I reminded him of Solomon's well-known 
saying, he replied that at any rate it was new enough 
to make a suitable article for his magazine. He asked 
me to write the article and I said I would. 

Ideas, like many other things, have a tendency to 
expand, and in the writing my theme grew beyond 
the limits of the Review of Reviews, for they seldom 
print an article of more than twenty-five hundred words 
and I found I had ten thousand. Instead of attempt- 
ing to revise and condense, I submitted it to a magazine 



iv PREFACE 

that sometimes does print long articles, tlie National 
Geographic Magazine, edited by Mr. Gilbert Grosvenor. 
The idea struck Mr. Grosvenor also as new and he 
wanted it for his magazine. But the theme eventually 
grew beyond the one article he wanted and into a 
series of four articles which (after three years of maul- 
ing over) appeared in the World's Work between No- 
vember, 1921, and Pebruary, 1922. 

Meantime, the talk at the Chamber of Commerce 
dinner had been quoted in the papers. My enthusiasm 
for the "message" also prompted me to refer to it again 
and again, and again and again it crept into the papers. 

In New York City I am a member of the Canadian 
Club. Apart from Siberia there is no country to which 
my "message" means more than to Canada, and when 
the Club decided to publish its own magazine and when 
they asked me for a contribution, I wrote a statement 
of only a few hundred words, thinking it would not 
pass beyond the Club membership. Curiously enough, 
this issue of the magazine attracted the attention of 
some editorial writer on the New Yorh Times and 
my little essay was copied almost in full July 18, 1920, 
with comments both favorable and thought-provoking. 

In November, 1920, I got a letter from S. Columb 
GilFillan, now Professor of Social Sciences in the Uni- 
versity of the South, in which he said he had read the 
Times editorial summary of my article. He enclosed 
a copy of his article, "The Coldward Course of Prog- 
ress," which had been published in September, 1920. 
This is the brief and scholarly presentation from which 



PREFACE V 

we have borrowed the graph that appears as frontispiece 
to this volume. 

When the thesis first presented in 1918 in a five- 
minute after-dinner speech was published as a twenty- 
five-thousand-word series in the World's WorTc, it met 
a reception which encouraged me to expand it into a 
book. What promised especially well was that many 
teachers of geography wrote to the World's Worh and 
to me asking for the material in a form that could 
be used in schools. If possible, I was more surprised 
than I was delighted to find how willing people gen- 
erally are to accept fresh information and new light 
on even the oldest pseudo-scientific dogmas. 

The first proofs of this book had been sent back to 
the printers, when I presented to a convention of the 
Association of American Geographers in ISTew York a 
brief discussion on the colonization of the grasslands 
of the world that lie north of the treeline. In his com- 
ments on my paper Professor Ellsworth Huntington 
said that Professor GilFillan had written him the sum- 
mer of 1915 a letter that contained the germ of the 
idea which Professor GilFillan later developed into his 
paper, "The Coldward Course of Progress," which (as 
stated above) was published in September, 1920. Up 
to now I had supposed that Professor GilFillan got the 
original stimulus towards the writing of his paper from 
my Maple Leaf magazine and the Neio Yorh Times 
editorial cited above. Evidently this was not the case, 
and we derived the idea independently from a consid- 
eration of the facts of the world we live in. Professor 



vi PREFACE 

GilFillan or any one else might also well have derived 
it as a coroUarj from Professor Huntington's great 
work on "Civilization and Climate/' in whicli the idea 
is implied. 

So far as I know, there is one man in the world pre- 
eminently qualified by experience and training to pass 
upon the facts and arguments of this book. Through 
his official position, he has in his files more pertinent 
evidence than perhaps any other man, while the same 
official position puts at his disposal for consultation 
many trained and keen minds scarce less familiar than 
his with the problems dealt with. This is Dr. Edward 
William iN^elson, Chief of the United States Biological 
Survey. Between 1879 and 1881 Dr. ISTelson spent four 
years in continuous residence near the northwest corner 
of Alaska. His base station was in the Yukon delta, 
but he made extensive winter journeys both north and 
south. On these journeys he gathered information only 
a part of which he has published in his books and 
scientific articles. Since his return from Alaska he 
has done considerable field work in sub-tropical regions 
and has had under his direction scientific observers 
who have worked in every climate of the globe. As this 
book deals with certain fundamental considerations of 
climate and with its effect upon various animals and 
especially upon man, I submitted the manuscript to 
Dr. ISTelson. When I found him in general agreement 
with the facts and with their interpretation in this 
book, I asked him to write an introduction for it. 



PREFACE vii 

The general thesis of this book lies closer to my heart 
than any other result of a twenty-four-year study of 
anthropology and geography. My anthropological in- 
terest has been largely in the movements of peoples and 
the causes that bring about and hinder migration and 
colonization. As a traveler I am chiefly familiar with 
the north "temperate" and north "frigid" zones. 
Through my fortunate connection with the Explorers 
Club of ISTew York and the various geographic societies 
of the world, I know personally many of the travelers 
who have been examining and interpreting the less 
known countries during the last several decades. Al- 
though their results have been open to me through 
conversation and through books, I have felt keenly the 
need of criticism by the highest authorities. In that 
connection I have appealed to the following men and 
with the following results: 

With regard to the Canadian Government's inquiry 
into the grazing resources of arctic Canada, my manu- 
script was read by Dr. J. G. Rutherford. By a lifetime 
of training and experience in helping to determine the 
land and livestock policy of the Canadian Pacific Rail- 
way and of the provincial and national governments of 
Canada, he has won to the foremost position as an 
authority upon these subjects. As Chairman of the 
Royal Commission on the Reindeer and Musk Ox 
Industry, he listened to the testimony of thirty-five 
explorers, missionaries, traders and others who had 
spent considerable portions of their lives in various 
parts of the polar regions. Many of the questions he 



viii PREFACE 

asked tliem have a direct bearing upon the thesis of 
this book, and his published summary of that testi- 
mony is in general agreement with it. On reading 
the manuscript Dr. Rutherford found himself to differ 
■with it on two chief points. In one case the difference 
was only apparent, and the text has been so clarified 
that the apparent difficulty no longer exists. In the 
other case the statement has been modified so as to 
conform with Dr. Rutherford's view — which was really 
mine always, only I had overlooked a certain angle 
of the case. 

Dr. Raymond Pearl, of Johns Hopkins University, 
was the chief statistician of the United States Pood 
Administration during the war and is one of the lead- 
ing authorities on the world's food supply. Professor 
J. Russell Smith is another leading authority on the 
same subject.^ IsTeither of these differed in any funda- 
mental, and most of the minor modifications and addi- 
tions suggested by them have been incorporated. 

Dr. Isaiah Bowman was formerly Professor of Geog- 
raphy at Yale and is now Director of the American 
Geographical Society. He is the author of many books 
on varied aspects of geography and is besides a dis- 
tinguished explorer of the tropics and south temperate 
lands. Where we compare the tropics with the polar 
regions, his judgment combines personal experience 
with scholarship and has, therefore, been exceptionally 



1 See "The Nation's Food," by Raymond Pearl, Philadelphia, 
1920, and "The World's Food Resources," by J. Russell Smith, 
New York, 1919. 



PREFACE ix 

valuable. All modifications suggested by him have 
been incorporated. 

Professor Alexander G. McAdie is the Director of 
the Blue Hill Observatory, Eeadville, Mass. His 
studies of the atmosphere and especially his investiga- 
tions carried out in cooperation with the Prince of 
Monaco have made him if not the leading at least one 
of the leading authorities on the temperature of the 
air over both the lands and the seas of the earth. He 
has read the sections on air temperature and these, 
accordingly, have the weight of his authority. 

With regard to the navigation of ice-covered seas 
by submarine I have consulted two authorities, only 
one of whom I am permitted to cite by name. Mr. 
Simon Lake shares with Holland the distinction of 
being the best known American submarine inventor. 
Through several decades he has made experiments with 
submarines under ice. He has not read any parts of 
the manuscript, but the points considered have been 
discussed with him by correspondence and he has fur- 
nished for use in this book a photograph illustrating 
the operation of one of his types of under-ice subma- 
rines. Another, of which he sent a blueprint drawing, 
seems even better suited. Any one who desires to com- 
pare Mr. Lake's opinions with those of this book can 
do so by consulting his book, which is included in the 
bibliography at the end of this volume. 

Most of the ideas as to the use of submarines under 
ice were developed independently of Mr. Lake or any 
other authority. More recently I have met an officer 



X PREFACE 

of the British 'Nslyj who commanded submarines which 
operated under ice to the north of Russia during the 
World War, and I have learnt from him that most of 
my ideas are ultra-conservative. I have not taken the 
trouble to remodel the submarine discussion in this book 
to conform strictly with his experiences, for my opinion 
is already sufficiently beyond what the layman con- 
siders probable. The knowledge of the almost marvel- 
ous adaptability of the submarine to under-ice work 
will for a time have to remain the exclusive property 
of the experts themselves. 

The comments and advice of these authorities, and 
of others whom I am not permitted to name, have given 
this book added certitude and me added confidence. 
But it must not be understood that they have assumed 
any responsibility as to facts and views here expressed. 
The responsibility for these is mine. 

I know in fact that some of the greatest authorities 
cited above differ with me on some points (e. g., as to 
whether cutting large ranges into small farms will tend 
to decrease the world's livestock supply). I might not 
dare to disagree with authorities so eminent, were it 
not that on checking up the points where one or another 
disagrees with me I find they disagree with each other. 

Although the members of my various expeditions 
and myself have taken thousands of photographs in the 
arctic and subarctic regions, I am by design using in 
this volume mainly pictures taken by others. This is 
to show that the difference between the arctic and sub- 
arctic regions of theory and those of fact is no less 



PREFACE xi 

apparent to the cameras of others than to cameras used 
by me. We are indebted to the following for permis- 
sion to nse photographs : the American Museum of 'Nat- 
ural History, Hawthorne Daniel, Department of Immi- 
gration and Colonization of Canada, Elmer W. Ekblaw, 
the Holt Manufacturing Company, Dr. W. T. Horna- 
day, Lomen Brothers and the JSTew York Zoological 
Society. 

The graph, "Path of Supremacy," is used by permis- 
sion of Professor S. Columb GilFillan and of the 
Political Science Quarterly. 

Eour of the chapters of this book are used by per- 
mission of World's Work J and the chapter on transpolar 
commerce by permission of the National Geographic 
Magazine. 

YlLHJALMITE STEFANSSOlSr. 
May 10, 1922. 



COIsTTElTTS 

PAGE 

Peefacb iii 

Ijstteoduction xvii 

CHAPTER 

I The ISToKTHWAED Coiiese of Empiee . 1 

II The ISToETH That ISTevee Was . . 20 

III The Feuitful Aectic .... 42 

TV The Livable InToeth .... 70 

V The Established Aectic Industeies . Ill 

VI The Domestication of Ovibos . . 137 

VII Teanspolae Commeece by Aie . . 168 

VIII Geneeal Consideeations . . . 203 

POSTSCEIPT . . . i . . 243 

Appendix 249 

Bibliogeapht 271 



LIST OF ILLUSTKATIONS 

The Path of Supremacy . . . Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE 

Eskimo Women of Alaska 10 

Eeindeee, Drift Logs and Tall Grass Along 
THE Polar Sea 50 

Cotton Grass on an Arctic Meadow . . 50 

The Camp of the Oil Drillers ISTear Fort 
^Norman, Just South of the Arctic Circle 112 

A Subarctic Field of Grain — IsTear Dawson 
in the Yukon 112 

An Eskimo Dog in the Tall Eskimo Grass . 134 

This Caribou Got Mixed with One of the 
Alaskan Reindeer Herds and Eventually 
Became Tamer Than the Animals That 
Had Been Born Domestic .... 134 

OviBOS IN Their ISTative Heath . . . .150 

OviBOS in Bronx Park, ISTew York . . . 150 

In Crossing the Polar Area Submarines 
Will ITavigate Most of the Time as Sur- 
face Ships 194 

Drawing Showing One Kind of Submarine — 
the Lake Type 194 

Tractor Drawing a Train of Sledges in 
Alaska . . 220 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING 
PAGE 

The Mackenzie Just South of the Aectic 
Clecle 220 

A BuENiNG Coal Mine, IsTeab Paeet Penin- 
sula, Two HuNDEED Miles Noeth of the 
Aectic Ciecle 238 

Flowingt Oil Well on the Mackenzie E-ivee 
Between Poet Noejvian and the Aectic 
Clecle 238 

Map 



INTEODUCTION" 

The brilliant and adventurous journey by Stefansson 
across the polar pack, "living off the country," and the 
substantial contributions to geography and many other 
branches of science brought back by himself and his 
staff have been justly applauded as distinguishing a 
notable arctic expedition. The contribution of most 
value to mankind brought back by Stefansson, however, 
is his appreciation that far northern lands are not the 
dread icy deserts of the popular belief but are possessed 
of a variety of resources and are available for occupa- 
tion by civilized man. 

It is true that for years fur traders, gold miners, and, 
in Alaska, reindeer herds, have extended north to the 
arctic coast, but to Stefansson belongs the credit of 
being the first to have the clear vision to appreciate the 
potential value of the I^orth as a whole, and for several 
years to have carried on an educational propaganda 
developing the startling fact that our last frontier did 
not vanish when the settlement of the United States 
and Canada reached the shores of the Pacific, but that 
another vast, untamed frontier lies ready for the ad- 
venturous pioneer in the ISTorth. With appealing liter- 
ary charm he has developed here and elsewhere the 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

story of the "livabilitj" of the Far ISTorth, and shown 
that this hitherto dreaded region offers a welcome to 
men of the stamj) of the early pioneers of America. In 
fact, with present methods of communication and facili- 
ties of modern life such northern settlers would have 
much fewer real hardships and deprivations to endure 
than did many of our not distant forebears in occupying 
what are now some of the most settled parts of the 
continent. 

That far northern winters are enjoyable periods I 
can personally testify, having passed through four of 
them in northern Alaska. There our summers, while 
not unpleasant, were periods of certain limitations 
owing to difficulty of travel except by water routes. In 
winter, however, snow on the land and ice on the rivers 
and sea offered a free road in any direction. Mid- 
winter was the time when the Eskimos held their fes- 
tivals, coming from far villages to central points to 
feast and enjoy social companionship. The fur traders 
made their rounds to native villages in search of furs 
and frequently journeyed hundreds of miles for brief 
visits to one another. At the beginning of each winter 
I looked forward with keen anticipation to long sledge 
trips, camping at Eskimo villages or wherever night 
overtook us in the open. The bracing vigor of the cli- 
mate gave a sense of well-being and sheer joy of living 
that must be experienced to be appreciated. After sev- 
eral thousand miles of sledging over Alaskan prairies, 
varied by later travel in the wilderness of lower lati- 



INTRODUCTION xix 

tudes, extending to the tropics, I can fully indorse 
Stefansson's belief as to the keener physical enjoyment 
of life in these fiorthern latitudes. This sense of physi- 
cal well-being and the mental exhilaration that goes with 
it, no doubt, in part at least, accounts for the fascination 
that the North appears to exert on a large share of those 
who have lived there and which holds many under its 
spell. 

The illumination thrown by Stefansson on the great 
northern frontier has added an increment of enormous 
total value to the vast area in northern Canada hitherto 
considered practically worthless, and the Canadian Gov- 
ernment may well congratulate itself on this unexpected 
by-product of a scientific exp'^dition. Furthermore, 
it has been made plain that not only far northern 
Canada but Alaska and the even greater territory 
of northern Siberia are potential sources of various 
useful products, especially of a meat supply on a great 
scale. The development of this idea is another illustra- 
tion of the frequent occurrence that geographic and 
other scientific work may produce unexpected results 
of untold value to mankind. 

In Alaska reindeer growing is already becoming an 
industry and, as a result of Stefansson's work, it is 
being undertaken in Bafiin Land. In far northern Can- 
ada and in Alaska oil prospecting is being done, in ad- 
dition to mining of other minerals, so the movement is 
already on to conquer our last American frontier. It 
has needed, however, the enthusiasm and facile pen of 



XX INTRODUCTION 

Stefansson to draw aside the veil of imaginary terrors 
which has heretofore concealed the real facts and has 
delayed the opening up to the world of a vast region. 

De. E. W. Nelson-, 
Chief United States Biological Survey. 

Washington, D. C, Febmury 13, 1922. 



THE ]!^OETHWAKD COURSE OF EMPIEE 



CHAPTEE I 
THE NOETHWAED COUESE OE EMPIEE 

Man, as an animal, is indeed, a tropical animal. 
But man, as distinguished from animals, is not at his 
best in the tropics or very near them. His fight up- 
ward in civilization has coincided in part at least with, 
his march northward over the earth into a cooler, 
clearer, more bracing air. 

Eor the last few centuries, and especially in America, 
our attention has been centered upon the proposition 
that "Westward the course of empire^takes its way." 
It has indisputably taken a westerly course during the 
last few centuries. But it is equally indisputable and 
more significant (because it rests upon broader natural 
causes) that northward the course of civilization has 
been taking its way, not only through the long period 
of written history and of tradition, but also through 
that far longer period, the records of which are the 
skeletons of the forerunners of men and of near-men, 
and of indubitable men who developed a civilization 
through millenniums of crude stone tools and polished 
stone and copper and bronze and iron down to Egypt 
and China as our histories show them. 

There are but two commonly held theories of the 

origin of man. Each places the spot of origin in or 

near the tropics, the one because the skeletons of the 

1 



2 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

anthropoids or pre-anthropoids, from wliicli they think 
man descended, have been found chiefly in the tropics, 
and the other because tradition says the Garden of 
Eden was in tropical lands. With many divergences, 
both fundamental and superficial, the two theories 
agree on the geogTaphic origin of man. 

Man as an animal is not only tropical in origin but 
is also by the nature of his body unfit to 'flourish in 
any other sort of climate. Even those who assert he 
was once hairy refrain from contending that he had 
fur. Hairy as he was he would have shivered in Italy 
and could not have prospered at all in the winter cli- 
mate of ISTorth Dakota or of Russia. ISTor would the 
most thoroughgoing advocate of a meat diet pretend 
he could flourish through hunting until after the in- 
vention of weapons and traps. He must have lived in 
a country not too cold for an unclad, furless animal 
where vegetables and fruits could be found at all times 
of year to constitute either his main diet or at least 
the bridges over necessary gaps in the meat supply. 

Then came the inventions of fire and clothing for 
combating the cold, and of weapons for killing the 
grass-eating animals upon which man could subsist 
though he could not directly upon the grass. With 
these inventions commenced the northward march of 
civilization, and we do not yet know how far north it 
will continue. At least that contention can be made, 
though it has to be made in the face of an overwhelm- 
ing public opinion to the effect that the northward 
limit has already been reached. 



'^- 






CTHE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 3 

Men at every period of history have been generally 
of the opinion that the ultimate limit of the northward 
spread of civilization had then at length been reached. 

It is a reasonable assumption, deduced from what 
we know of later history, that even the thoughtful men 
of Memphis and of Babylon failed to see potentialities 
for much beyond barbarism in the Greece and Italy 
of their time. We know as a matter of recorded opinion 
that the Greeks and Romans not only considered the 
people to the north of them inferior, but believed 
that that inferiority must continue, largely because of 
a supposedly hostile climate of the lands to the north. 
Tacitus probably knew as much as any of his contem- 
poraries about the lands beyond the Alps, and was 
merely voicing the general opinion of his time and 
countrymen when he said that nobody could conceive 
that any one, unless forced by the stern necessity of 
war, would willingly leave the fertile shores of Africa 
or the plains of Italy for the country north of the Alps, 
where the climate is as disagreeable as the soil is sterile. 
This was undoubtedly a truism of his time ; but it is a 
fact of our time that many people live in Paris and 
other parts of France by choice. 

Draper tells us in his "History of the Intellectual 
Development of Europe" that in the Middle Ages the 
stables of the Moors in Spain were better than the 
palaces of the kings of England, and we know that the 
Moors of that time were as certain with regard to 
Britain as Tacitus had been in his day with reference 
to France that the foggy and chilly climate was 



4 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

inimical to a high development, and that nothing 
much was to he expected of such a country and its 
people. To-day there can be found as many to agree 
as to disagree with the contention that Britain has for 
a century been the foremost land of the earth.^ 

The undervaluation of the North by the Romans 
and the Moors is not difficult to explain. With them 
and in every other period of history it has rested on 
one ground, and does so to-day with us. Their civili- 
zation and ours had a common southern origin. The 
lands of the South have been the lands of known his- 
tory, and their problems have been well understood. 
At any given time a portion of Egypt or of Babylonia 
may have been a desert, but the Romans and Moors 
and we have always understood how deserts may be 
irrigated and that such problems are n(>t insoluble. 
But the problems of the ISTorth have never been under- 
stood, for they are not of the past but of the future. 
We do not know what they are and even when we learn 
what they are the solution is yet to be devised. 

It is human nature that we undervalue the distant 
and exaggerate the difficulties of the unknown. My 
friend. Professor Ellsworth Huntington of Tale, once 
sent out a letter of inquiry to about two hundred 

1 During the writing of this book there has been called to my 
attention a pertinent passage on pages 292-3 of the third volume 
of Pierre Duhena's "Le syst&me du monde." There was at the 
University of Montpellier in the thirteenth century a man, appar- 
ently of English birth, named Eobertus Anglicus, who protested 
there against the current teaching that England was uninhabita- 
ble because of a disagreeable climate or because of lack of re- 
sources, wherefrom he seems to have gained the reputation of 
being a visionary. 



THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPHIE 5 

geographers, etlinographers, and other men of "wide 
information in various lands, asking them among other 
things to give their opinion on the degree of civiliza- 
tion of the people of Iceland. The classification was to 
be made on the basis of a scale of 10, the people of high 
civilization being Group ITo. 10, and those of the dark- 
est savagery in Group ISTo. 1. The civilization of Ice- 
land was graded as follows: 

The Asiatics ; put Iceland in gi'oup 3 

" Latin Europeans " " " " 4 

" Americans " " " " 5, 

« British " " " " 6 

" Germans and Scandinavians " " " " 8 

Each in his own country these authorities were of 
approximately equal culture, rank and native intelli- 
gence, yet the Asiatics because they were geographically 
and culturally remote, put the Icelanders near the bot- 
tom of the intellectual scale, while the nearest neigh- 
bors of Iceland placed it not far from the top. Erom 
this classification we accordingly learn nothing reliable 
or valuable about Iceland; but we get instead further 
confirmation of the principle that we tend to under- 
value whatever is remote. 

To the peoples of the centers of civilization the un- 
eolonized ISTorth has been more or less remote geo- 
graphically and almost infinitely remote from a cul- 
tural and historical point of view, for the information 
about it was in considerable part misinformation and 
its history and problems lay in the future. 



6 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

On the basis of distance and misinformation the 
ISTorth has always been supposed to be dreadful and 
devoid of resources. These judgments have always 
been wrong and this we could prove by dozens of fur- 
ther instances although we shall adduce only two or 
three. 

In 1763 a great struggle had just ended in Europe 
that is known on the American side as the "French 
and Indian War/' and the plenipotentiaries of France 
and England had met to adjudicate a peace. 

They haggled over the division of spoils, notably 
over the political control of certain territories which 
they strove to acquire or retain with an eagerness pro- 
portionate to their idea of the present and future com- 
mercial value of these lands. The greatest commodity 
of the modern world is oil and we are now deeply con- 
cerned with oil lands; sugar was not in 1763 a corre- 
spondingly important commodity, but its future signifi- 
cance was realized by commercial leaders and the sugar 
lands were among the chief bones of contention. 

It was amusing to those familiar with the history 
of foods to read during the late war in medical joux'nals 
and elsewhere articles filled with deep concern for the 
health of the "civilized" nations on the score of their 
being compelled to get along on an "inadequate sugar 
ration." Sugar has been a significant element in our 
food for only a comparatively insignificant period. 
Four hundred years ago it was unknown in Europe, 
and honey and other "sugar substitutes" were then of 
scarcely greater significance in the diet of our an- 



THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 7 

cestors than tomato ketchup is in ours. Many people 
lived their threescore and ten without eating a pound 
of honey. Three hundred years ago sugar was a luxury 
of kings ; two hundred years ago it was still unregarded 
by most people. But a few realized its coming im- 
portance and so the peace conference of 1763 kept 
haggling about the sugar lands. 

The British, feeling that they were in a position to 
do so, asked among other things that the French turn 
over to them the island of G-uadeloupe. To this the 
French replied in substance that they disliked ex- 
tremely to give up Guadeloupe as it was an island 
containing sugar plantations of great value to the citi- 
zens of France, and suggested they would much prefer 
to surrender Canada. To this the British objected that 
while Canada was larger than Guadeloupe, it was not 
^ood for much. There were, of course, some furs, and 
there were codfish on the ^Newfoundland Banks, but 
on the whole it was not a very valuable piece of prop- 
erty, and they much preferred Guadeloupe. After a pro- 
longed deadlock Benjamin Franklin suggested through 
a pamphlet that while Gaudeloupe was more valuable 
than Canada, it was a distant island, while Canada 
was contiguous territory, and if we allowed the power 
of France to develop at our very door there would be 
continual friction. Eventually the British accepted 
Canada, apparently for political rather than economic 
reasons. And now not half of the readers of this book 
can find Guadeloupe without looking it up in the index 
of some book of reference. 



8 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

In 1867 in America a great war had come to a close. 
During that war the side which eventually triumphed 
had not been supported so consistently hy any major 
European power as hy Russia. The country was grate- 
ful to Russia and it became necessary to translate that 
gratitude into substantial terms. To put it in modem 
parlance, they wanted to "slip some coin" to Russia 
as a reward for kindness received, and they carried 
out what was for that time an extremely large but 
otherwise quite ordinary political transaction by pur- 
chasing Alaska for $7,200,000. Such are the views 
of many historians as to the reasons for the Alaska 
Purchase. Woodrow Wilson's history seems to consider 
as the chief motive, the extension of the Monroe Doc- 
trine to still another part of the American continent, 
while others think the United States bought Alaska for 
some ready money partly to show European nations, 
which doubted America's solvency and power to recu- 
perate after a devastating war, that the country was 
not really broke. 

There are still other explanations of why Alaska 
was purchased but none of them rests on the assumption 
that the territory was intrinsically worth the price. 
It may have been that Secretary Seward and a few 
others realized that the money was not an actual gift 
and that Alaska had a great future, although, if that 
was so, Seward must have been a good deal wiser in 
his generation than Benjamin Eranklin had been with 
reference to Canada in an earlier one. However that 
be, the Republican Party and Secretary Seward were 



THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 9 

attacked in the next presidential campaign for having 
spent several millions of public money for a lump 
of ice. 

If you want to make up your mind vs^hat people 
really thought of Alaska at the time of its purchase 
and for many years after, turn to the files of the news- 
papers for the next presidential campaign (which re- 
sulted in the election of Grant) and you will find the 
Democrats attacking the Republicans on the score of 
the Alaska purchase. They put up a bitter fight on 
this issue. That in itself does not mean much, for 
such are the tactics of politics. But turn to the defense 
made by the Republicans and the lameness of it will 
convince you that they had no pride in what they had 
done, nor even faith in the future to exculpate, let 
alone justify, them. They felt themselves to be the 
pot and the best they could do was to call the kettle 
black. They drew a herring across the trail by calling 
the Democrats traitors and slaveholders; they shifted 
the battle to the old reliable issue of the tariff. 

I am not a profound historical scholar and my 
memory does not go back to Grant's time, but this is 
history as I have read it. It was not till about 1900, 
when gold was discovered in Alaska, that politicians 
began to "point with pride" to Seward on the score of 
his purchase and I believe it was Franklin K. Lane 
(perhaps because he was born in Canada and had there- 
fore a better understanding of the potentialities of the 
ISTorth) who first among cabinet officials had a vision 
of Alaska's coming greatness. 



10 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

When first it began to dawn on the United States 
that Alaska was of value, it was her mineral resources 
they saw. This again is a common historical phe- 
nomenon. When Columbus sailed west from Spain he 
was ostensibly in search of a short route to the Indies. 
He probably did not expect to find America. At least 
the popular view was that he had been searching for 
Asia and when he returned his was one of the many 
exploring expeditions that have been called failures 
because they discovered something quite different from 
that which had been expected. By way of making the 
best of the unfortunate fact that America blocked the 
direct sea route to China, those who went there, imless 
they were searching for a fountain of youth, were com- 
monly looking for gold and precious stones. ISTone of 
them were looking for the potato, although its un- 
heralded discovery has proved of greater value to the 
world than all the gold dug out of the two continents. 
So it was. and will be with Alaska — the first things to 
be looked for were precious metals and furs, but the 
greatest things to come out of it will not be those origi- 
nally looked for. 

Alaska had its turn as a gold seeker's paradise, and 
since 1900 has been much in men's minds on that score. 
Later it was realized that in portions fairly accessible 
from the Pacific there were huge deposits of copper 
more valuable than the gold, and coal mines of no less 
promise, and unless the present industrial trend is 
altered, the forests are likely to become more valuable 
than either. 



THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 11 

In 1918 there were many resources of Alaska 
Tinder cultivation, of whicli tiie fisheries were only one. 
Of the fisheries the salmon were only a part, of the 
salmon the sockeye variety was only one, and of the 
sockeye caught only a part was canned. Tet the part 
that was canned was sold for twenty-two million dol- 
lars, giving in one year a return more than three times 
the original purchase price of Alaska. 

This is merely the beginning of our realization of 
the accidental or vaguely designed wisdom of "Seward's 
Folly," for the salmon, valuable as they are, will soon 
be far exceeded in value by other food products of 
Alaska. Seattle, one of the biggest American cities, is 
already being supplied by the market gardens^^-of 
Alaska, And the estimates of the U. S. Department 
of Agriculture are that within fifteen years the output 
of Alaskan reindeer meat at present prices per pound 
will be worth from forty-five to sixty million dollars 
a year. 

More than two centuries ago the Dutch discovered 
Spitsbergen, the south tip of which is about 300 miles 
farther north than the north tip of Alaska (a fact that 
must, however, be interpreted in the light of the un- 
eymmetrical nature of the polar regions as explained, 
tfor instance, in Chapter II of "The Eriendly Arctic," 
[New York, 1921). Whale and seal oil were of far 
greater commercial importance then than now, and this 
group of islands soon became an important focus of 
the whale "fishery." AU of it was claimed by Great 



12 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

Britain and all was claimed by Holland, and other 
countries made various claims, but as a matter of fact 
most of the country was for a long time controlled by 
the British and a small part by the Dutch. Later these 
"fisheries" declined in value and disappeared when 
Standard Oil began to furnish the light of the world. 
'No British or other sailors made any regular visits 
for years; and Gladstone, as Prime Minister of Great 
Britain, renounced any claims that Britain might have 
had, saying and apparently believing that the islands 
could only be a bill of expense if possession were 
maintained. 

Some years later the Hamburg-American Line and 
other steamship lines cultivated Spitsbergen as one of 
the interesting outposts of the tourist trade, exploiting 
that most commonplace-looking of marvels, the "mid- 
night sun," which no one can tell from any other sun 
by anything but reference to a watch carrying local 
time. 

About the beginning of our century there were in 
Sweden some men of foresight who proposed in the 
Parliament that Sweden should take possession of 
Spitsbergen. This proposal was promptly turned down 
on the ground that Sweden had no claims to Spits- 
bergen and did not want to have, as the country was 
not worth claiming. 

And then it happened that some Americans visited 
the place as tourists and came upon some-coal on the 
beach and some iron. On the strength of this and 
other evidence, engineers were sent there and reported 



THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 13 

that the islands contained fabulous quantities of easily 
accessible coal and iron of high grade. An American 
company was organized for the promotion of these 
mines, and a JSTorwegian and an English company were 
also organized. 

Several countries then simultaneously awoke to the 
realization of the value of Spitsbergen. Holland be- 
gan to claim it because she had discovered it, Glreat 
Britain because she had for a long time held possession 
of it, and Russia and the Scandinavian countries be- 
cause they had. esxplored it and had other possessions 
not so very many hundreds of miles away from it. 
Even the Germans claimed it. Each country was a 
dog in the manger so far as all the other countries 
were concerned, and anarchy was a consequence. 
Though huge commercial enterprises were being under- 
taken, there was on the islands no police officer or 
judge or any vestige of recognized government, and no 
way of legally obtaining title to any property. 

In 1913 on a visit to England I met one of the 
large coal mine owners of Wales, who told me that it 
was already then clearly foreseen by himself and all 
the other coal men whom he knew that Spitsbergen was 
soon to become one of the chief competitors, if not the 
chief competitor, of Wales in the coal markets of the 
world. 

The representations of the various commercial con- 
cerns finally led to an international convention of the 
countries involved. This convention had met in ISTor- 
way and was in session when it was suddenly and auto- 



'Jl.,*t:^P^-i> 



-tvif>-*»'r>' 



14 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

maticallj dissolved hj the conflagration of the World 
War. Later the American capitalists, doubtless partly 
because they failed to secure support from their gov- 
ernment, sold their holdings to the ISTorwegians, and 
Great Britain and ISTorway remained the tw^o countries 
most vitally interested. 

IsTow comes a chapter in the story of Spitsbergen 
that is humorous or tragic or pathetic according to 
one's attitude toward the statesmen and industrial 
pioneers of Britain. In the spring of 1920 the news- 
papers carried an announcement that the British had 
surrendered to ITorway their political claims to Spits- 
bergen. I was in IsTefw York when this news was pub- 
lished and was interviewed on the subject by some 
enterprising reporters. As it seemed to me clear that 
Britain had a stronger daim to the islands than any 
other nation, and certainly a much stronger one than 
Norway, I gave it as my opinion that there must be 
behind the transaction some secret political bargain, 
possibly made at a time of war stress and uncertainty, 
and that ISTorway was being rewarded now by Britain 
for having kept her agreement. Knowing the large 
investment of English and Scotch capital in the Spits- 
bergen coal mines I did not conceive it possible that 
English diplomats had now succeeded in doing in the 
case of ISTorway what they had failed in 1763 to do 
with France, when they tried to give away (or refuse 
to receive) Canada.,^ 

2 When strongly impressed with their value, the British have 
occasionally "grabbed" remote lands, their titles to which were 



THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 15 

Soon after the publication of this interview I went 
to England and found that so far as my friends knew, 
who were interested in the Spitsbergen mines, the un- 
believable was true. Their statements may have been 
colored by the heat of their feelings, but they told me 
that the substance of the story was this: The ISForwe- 
gians had said to the British diplomats at Paris that 
if Britain didn't mind very much they would like, 
please, to be given Spitsbergen. To this the British 
had replied in substance that they didn't see why any- 
body wanted those isolated, frozen islands, but if any- 

Tjy no means clear. This makes the more curious their propensity 
as a government to give away, under a short-sighted impression 
of their worthlessness, lands to which their title was clear. 
Apropos of certain news despatches about Wrangel Island, this 
propensity was recently summarized by an Editorial in the New 
York Evening Post: "The occupation of Wrangel Island, nominally 
for Great Britain and actually for Canada, is designed to make 
good a claim which could never rest on the mere fact of British ' 
discovery. It adds another to the many striking instances of 
the extension of British sovereignty by energetic subjects without 
the knowledge and even against the will of the colonial office. 
London cares nothing about Wrangel Island, and Ottawa little. 
New Zealand was saved to Great Britain In 1839 by the spirited 
colonizer, Edward Gibon Wakefield, only when the French were 
on the point of taking possession. In Hawaii in 1794 a council 
of chiefs asked for British protection, and a naval lieutenant 
hoisted the British flag, while in 1822 Kamechameha II. con-, 
firmed the protectorate, but the British government would never 
acknowledge the acquisition. Tahiti was discovered by the British 
in 1767 and a British flag hoisted, while in 1825 Queen Pomare 
was eager for a British protectorate ; but Louis Philippe of France 
was allowed to take over the island. The Fiji islands all but 
slipped from the careless^British grasp — W. T. Pritchard saved 
them, to the intense indignation of the colonial office. Australia 
for years after 1867 labored to eflfect British annexation of east- 
em New Guinea, but the British resisted until they found that 
the Germans had gobbled half. 

"Islands, as Carlyle said of tools, belong to those who can use 
them. Under international law the mere hoisting of a flag, with- 
"tsut continuing occupation, avails nothing." ^~--.. ^ 



16 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

body did want thein badly enough to ask for them they 
didn't see why they shouldn't have them. 

If this be a true statement, these British diplomats 
can at least quote an excellent precedent from Tacitus 
— they were repeating about Spitsbergen what he would 
have said about Britain nearly two thousand years 
earlier. 

But if the diplomats at Paris happened to be igno- 
rant about Spitsbergen, the press and public in the 
British Isles were not, and there arose a storm of pro- 
test. I still have a feeling that my own guess may 
have been right — that there was with ISTorway some 
secret British diplomatic bargain to which the poli- 
ticians have not owned. But the coal men I talked 
with laid it all to pure ignorance. "When taxed, with 
their blunder, the diplomats had been able to reply only 
that the ^Norwegians had agreed to respect the prop- 
erty rights of British subjects and that capital already 
invested there was guaranteed fair treatment. But, 
these disgruntled business men said, that is not the 
same as owning the islands. 

Por Spitsbergen itself and for the world as a whole 
it may be just as well that ISTorway should be the 
overlord, but I have not yet talked with any Britishers 
who take that detached view. And certainly not the 
stockholders of the Spitsbergen companies. One com- 
pany is said to be capitalized at twenty-five million 
dollars and the aggregate of the British companies is 
said to be more than fifty millions. These figures are 
not to be relied on except as meaning that British in- 



THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 17 

terests in these very remote northern enterprises were 
large and "would presumably soon have become larger. 

Meantime the Journal of the Royal Geographical 
Society of Great Britain tells us that in 1918, in spite 
of the extraordinary difficulties due to the unsettled 
condition of Europe (and not to the climate or latitude 
of Spitsbergen) one hundred thousand tons of coal were 
exported. The Journal also says that the Admiralty 
of Great Britain has published a table of the compara- 
tive steam values of various kinds of coal, which places 
that of Spitsbergen higher than the best Welsh coal. 
It says further that while the rich iron ore of Spits- 
bergen is at present being exported to smelters in Great 
Britain this is but a transient phenomenon, for in the 
course of a few years local smelters are certain to be 
built. Spitsbergen is one of a very few known places 
in the world where a large quantity of easily accessible 
hard coal is found in close proximity to large quan- 
tities of easily accessible iron ore of high grade. 

It has always beon easy for people of that type of 
mind known as "practical," "sound," and "conserva- 
tive" to prove that lands as yet of no value cannot pos- 
sibly ever be of value. In striking contrast to this type 
of mind is that of the born explorer, who must above 
all things be a man of imagination. Henry Hudson, 
the second navigator to reach those islands, noted in 
his journal in the year 1607 that he had no doubt 
Spitsbergen "would be profitable to whoever should 
adventure it." 

Chief of the arguments against the value of Spits- 



18 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

bergen fifteen years ago was that it was located in an 
arctic sea which, although it could be navigated at cer- 
tain seasons, could not be profitably navigated because 
interrupted navigation was said to be never profitable. 
This same argument is at present being advanced most 
convincingly against the feasibility of the Hudson Bay 
route which the Canadian Government is developing 
as a means of contact between the prairie provinces 
and Europe, by way of Hudson Straits. Although the 
argument sounds convincing when pronounced with 
conviction, actual trial has failed to confirm it. I have 
talked with an able mining engineer who at one time 
was in charge of the mines of the American firm, 
Ayer and Longyear, in Spitsbergen, and he has told me 
that he believes coal can be so cheaply mined and trans- 
ferred from Spitsbergen to Europe that Spitsbergen 
will drive ISTewcastle and Wales out of the continental 
coal markets north of their latitude, which means 
among others those of the White Sea and the Murman 
Coast and the northern half of the Scandinavian coun- 
tries. 

"All very interesting," the critics may say, "but it 
is a long lane that has no turning. Tacitus was wrong 
when he said people would never by choice live as far 
north as France; the Moors of the Middle Ages were 
short-sighted when they undervalued the possibilities 
of Britain ; it is strange that as astute a man as Frank- 
lin thought a small tropic isle like Guadeloupe com- 
mercially more valuable than Canada ; Seward was wise 



THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 19 

in buying Alaska and Gladstone a simpleton to want 
to renounce Spitsbergen. But surely there must be 
somewhere the limit to ISTorthward progress. Have we 
not come to that limit now?" 

We have not come to the northward limit of com- 
mercial progress. There was many a pause but no stop 
to the westward course of empire until we came to the 
place where East is West. In that sense only is there 
a northward limit to progress. Corner lots in Rome 
were precious when the banks of the Thames had no 
value; the products of Canada were little beyond furs 
and fish when the British and French agreed in pre- 
ferring Guadeloupe. But values have shifted north 
since then and times have changed. Times will con- 
tinue to change. There is no northern boundary 
beyond which productive enterprise cannot go till 
iN^orth meets N^orth on the opposite shores of the Arctic 
Ocean as East has met West on the Pacific. 



CHAPTEE II 
THE i;rOKTH THAT NEVER WAS 

If the average American or European university 
graduate has ten ideas about the ISTorth, nine of them 
are wrong. So far as the victims of American educa- 
tion are concerned, I know from experience. As to 
the Europeans, I judge them by their books and con- 
versation. 

I happened to be born a British subject in Mani- 
toba which is British territory, but my parents moved 
to the United States when I was only a year old and 
I have been through the regular mill of American edu- 
cation — common school, high school, and university to 
the Bachelor of Arts degree at the State University 
of Iowa, I then had three years of post-graduate study 
at Harvard, held a scholarship and two fellowships 
there, and even became an instructor in a minor ca- 
pacity. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that dur- 
ing the period of my formal and informal education 
I absorbed the same general type of misinformation 
as does the average American. When I went ISTorth 
and became an explorer I found that nine out of ten 
of my ideas about the polar regions were wrong, and 
from that I infer that if you are an honor graduate of 
some university you are probably in as bad a case. 

When I was a student at Harvard, Samuel McChord 



''7 



20 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 21 

Crothers was preacliing just across the way from us. 
It was a delight to listen to him, whether in church or 
in the lecture room, and from that delight I passed 
to the equal joy of reading his essays and hooks. The 
reading of one of these essays may not have been 
exactly a turning point in my life, but it was an event 
that had a lasting effect on me. The essay was on the 
advisability of founding a university of unlearning. 
Wherever I have gone since, but especially in the polar 
regions, the opening of each new vista has brought a 
further endorsement of the general wisdom of that 
proposal. 

Doctor Crothers said that this and other lands are 
filled with schools and colleges engaged in teaching us 
things that are not so, and it would be a highly de- 
sirable thing if there could be established in each 
country at least one well-known institution where you 
might go and unlearn a few of them. This he pro- 
posed to call in each country the National University 
of Polite Unlearning. 

For many years it has been a large part of my activi- 
ties to say in lectures and writings and conversation 
that the Far North, both in the western and eastern 
hemispheres, is destined to be colonized in the same 
general way as were the Western prairies of the United 
States half a century ago, by the same type of people, 
and with a resulting civilization not fundamentally 
dissimilar. This assertion is met in the minds of read- 
ers or listeners by small armies of objections. The 
things you think you know about the North arise in 



22 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

a body to declare that the contention is absurd. On 
such occasions I think of myself as a professor in 
Doctor Crothers's University of Unlearning. With the 
initial advantage of knowing what the reader or lis- 
tener thinks he knows about the North (for I knew 
those things myself once and believed them until I went 
ilSTorth and found they were not true), I proceed as 
follows to demolish his misknowledge. 

1. ISTearly if not quite the most fundamental wrong 
idea about the ISTorth is that the ISTorth Pole is the 
coldest place in the northern hemisphere, and that the 
polar regions are far colder in the coldest part of win- 
ter than any countries that are now inhabited by the 
average civilized European or American. When we 
stop to think about it, we see we have really always 
known that this could not be true — as will appear below. 

Besides minor considerations, there are three main 
factors that determine what the possible minimum tem- 
perature of any place may be. These are latitude, alti- 
tude, and distance from the ocean. We see at once 
that the I^^orth Pole has in a high degree only one of 
these three qualifications for being extremely cold. 
Certainly it is at a high latitude. But the North 
Pole does not lie high above sea level, for it is located 
in an ocean, .which Admiral Peary, at the time he 
visited the Pole, found to be more than twelve thou- 
sand feet deep. And if it is not above sea level neither 
is it far away from the ocean, for it lies in the ocean. 
Possessing only one of the three main qualifications 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 23 

for being extremely cold, it naturally is never ex- 
tremely cold. Those who theorize about it generally 
"'agree that the minimum temperature there seldom if 
ever drops below sixty below zero, Fahrenheit. How- 
ever, that is a matter of theory. ISTo one has as yet 
spent an entire year at the Korth Pole. It need not 
be more than a year or two, and in my opinion it will 
not be more than a decade or two, until somebody goes 
to the North Pole, stays there a year,^ and brings back 
to us a coherent account of how cold or warm it is 
there from day to day for the twelve months. The 
main handicap in an attempt of this sort would be the 
mobile nature of the fractured floating ice that covers 
the vicinity of the Pole. It seems probable that after 
being formed in the part of the ocean that lies between 
the North Pole and Alaska, the ice masses drift across 
the polar area at the rate of perhaps half a mile per 
day. They are bound for the Atlantic; their destina- 
tion is the ocean to the north of Iceland and Norway, 
where they meet the warm waters that farther south 
make up the Gulf Stream,^ are melted, and disappear. 
Any one who made his camp at the North Pole would 
learn through astronomical observations after a few 
weeks that he was no longer at home and would have 
to pick up his bed and walk back to the North Pole. 
Apart from that, living there a year would be easier 

1 For one of the methods by which this could be done easily, 
see "The Friendly Arctic," especially the account of the 1914 
"Ice Trip" and of Stonkerson's Beaufort Sea journey of 1918. 

2 In this book "Gulf Stream" is to be understood as that com- 
bination of wind currents and water currents which modify so 
profoundly the climate of the north Atlantic lands and seas. 



24 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

than some polar achievements that are already history. 

If the actual minimum temperature of the North 
Pole is a matter of theory, we are in no doubt about 
the temperatures of the north coast of Canada or 
Alaska, Eor more than twenty years in the case of 
Canada and about forty in the case of the United 
States there have been weather bureau observation sta- 
tions on the north coast of ISTorth America. I have 
spent in the polar regions ten winters and thirteen 
summers myself and during most of that time I have 
carried reliable thermometers, so that I could say from 
my own experience how cold it is up there in winter 
and how warm in summer, but I prefer to quote the 
records of the Canadian and American weather bureaus. 
I have written both of them and asked them to give 
me the lowest temperature ever recorded in the 
Canadian station at Herschel Island on the north 
coast of Canada near the mouth of the Mackenzie 
River, and the American station near Point Barrow, 
at the north tip of Alaska, about 250 miles north of 
the arctic circle. The replies in both cases were 
identical: "We have never recorded anything lower 
than 54° F. below zero." 

The other day I was reading over a report of the 
meteorological observations of my arctic expedition of 
1913-18, made by the second-in-command. Dr. R. M. 
Anderson. He says, "The lowest temperature of the 
winter (1915-16) was 46° below zero," or about 
like Saranac Lake, ISTew York State, which is a winter 
resort. Temperatures as low as 50° below zero are 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 25 

rare on the north coast of North America and there 
are many winters when 45 or 46 below is the low- 
est record. 

After asking the United States Weather Bureau for 
the lowest record applicable to the north coast of 
Alaska, I inquired for the lowest temperature ever re- 
corded in some settled portion of the United States in 
some average American community where a good many 
Americans live in comfort. They replied that in a 
small town near Havre, Montana, they had registered 
68° below zero. Almost as low temperatures have 
been recorded in Havre itself, and Havre is a typical 
American town of four or five thousand inhabitants, 
with stores and shops, with schools and little children 
going to school, with churches and people going to 
church ^ at a temperature fourteen degrees lower than 
it ever has been knovTn to be on the north coast of 
North America and about ten degrees lower than it 
probably ever is at the North Pole. And Havre is not 
by any means the only place in the United States where 



3 The methodist clergyman at El Centre, California, told me 
in 1921 that his and the other churches of El Centro (a town 
of ten or twenty thousand Americans) suspend church services 
for several weeks every summer because no one can come because 
of the heat. There is no such period of suspension of activities at 
Havre, even when the cold for days and weeks is more intense 
than at the North Pole. Churches and high schools and kinder- 
gartens may have their attendance lowered by blizzard or cold, 
but they seldom if ever close even for a day of emergency. There 
certainly are no protracted and regular periods of suspended 
activity, such as you find with the churches in several of those 
American towns where the extreme summer heat ranges from 
110° to 122° in the shade (as Yiuna, Arizona, El Centro, 
California, etc.). 



26 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

the mininmin cold is lower than on the north coast of 
ilTorth America. 

I lived for fifteen years in Pembina County at the 
northeast corner of I^orth Dakota^ and as a small boy 
I used to go two and a half mUes to a country school 
at a temperature as low as I have ever seen it in my 
journeys along the coastline or over the moving sea ice 
in the polar regions. All the other little boys and girls 
did likewise and none of us realized that we were 
heroes doing it. Since then, much better dressed and 
outfitted and in every way better able to take care of 
myself, I have done the same thing as a polar explorer, 
and have been counted a hero for doing it. At my 
birthplace in Manitoba the minimum government 
record is 55° below zero, one degree lower than the 
minimum for the north coast of ISTorth America. Ac- 
cordingly, if you happen to be living in Manitoba or 
Dakota or Montana and want to become a polar ex- 
plorer, about all you have to do for a proper outfit when 
you start north is to leave at home a few of your 
clothes. 

I once said substantially this in a lecture at Kalispell, 
Montana, and noticed that my audience did not seem 
to be particularly pleased. After my talk a number 
of them came to me and, after first saying that my 
talk had been interesting on the whole, they went on 
to say that they resented the way I ran down Montana 
and hoped that I would not do it outside the state. 
"Here in Montana," they said, "we realize that 60 
below zero is not particularly dreadful and that you 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 27 

can go about your ordinary work without discomfort 
at such temperatures, hut people outside the state might 
not realize it and might get the wrong idea from what 
you say." 

I replied hy saying that I was merely using IVContana 
as a yardstick. The merits of Montana are perfectly 
well known, not only in the state itself but in Florida 
and Kentucky and California and Europe. When you 
speak of a yardstick you do so because everybody 
knows how long a yard is. The merits of Montana are 
almost as well known as the length of a yard. When 
you think of Montana you think of vast herds of cattle 
and sheep and horses that run out all winter without 
a barn and without hay, and do pretty well at a tem- 
perature lower than that of the north coast of North. 
America. I was merely comparing a place well known 
to be excellent with another place little known and 
supposed to be disagreeable. I was not running down 
Montana but praising the North. 

Coming back to the principle enunciated above, we 
see we have always known Montana ought to be colder 
than the North Pole/ for of the three main factors 
which determine extreme winter cold — latitude, alti- 
tude, and distance from the sea — the North Pole has 
only latitude while Montana is reasonably far north, 
is reasonably high above sea level even in the towns 
\vhere people live, and is far away from any ocean. 



•* This is a discussion of minimum temperatures. Mean tempera- 
tures are considered elsewhere. 



28 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

The combination, accordingly, produces extremely low 
temperatures in winter. 

A moment's thought will show, however, that on the 
basis of these factors the coldest point in the northern 
hemisphere cannot be in Korth America, for the same 
factors have a higher value on the larger continent of 
Eurasia. Accordingly, we find the cold pole of the 
northern hemisphere in Siberia, north of Yakutsk, 
where, by figures published by the Royal GeogTaphical 
Society of Great Britain, the temperature goes down 
to 92° below zero in winter. Other sources equally 
respectable give the minimum temperature at 96° below 
zero. And this is a settled community. They do not 
cultivate tropical fruits at Yakutsk nor, indeed, wheat 
or Indian com, but they do have oats and barley and 
rye and garden products, and some of the people are 
the blond type of European, very much like the rest of 
us in complexion and characteristics, although show- 
ing just now a slightly higher percentage of Bolshevism. 

2. A complement of the idea that the ISTorth is dread- 
fully cold in winter is the notion that it is also cold 
through the entire summer. It is possible to maintain 
that the winters are dreadfully cold, but only by agree- 
ing that the winters of northern Vermont and Saranac 
Lake and Minnesota and Montana are also dreadfully 
cold. But no one can even glance at the Weather 
Bureau records for summer temperatures in polar 
regions and maintain that in any sense of the English 
language the summers there are "always cold." 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 29 

Climate may be classified in various ways. One of 
them is to make a division between continental and 
insular climates. The ocean is a great stabilizing in- 
fluence. In the tropics it acts generally as a refrig- 
erator and in the polar regions as a radiator. Even 
the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico are colder than 
the surface of the land in Texas in summer, and ac- 
cordingly the sea breezes keep Galveston and Corpus 
Christi reasonably cool. I was told at Fort Bragg, on 
the west coast of California, last summer, that since 
the town was built the temperature there has never 
risen above 85° in the shade, for the ocean breezes 
are continually blowing across it. But fifty miles in- 
land beyond a range of mountains they frequently 
have a temperature of 110° in the shade. Remember- 
ing that this is true of Texas and California, we are 
prepared to hear that the coastlines of the polar regions 
are never warm in summer. Five miles from the ocean 
at Point Barrow the temperature probably seldom if 
ever rises above Y5° in the shade, which is ten degrees 
colder than the similar record for Fort Bragg, Cali- 
fornia, both places being at sea level and near the 
sea. But fifty miles inland in California gives you a 
temperature of 110° in the shade, and a hundred miles 
inland in Alaska will give a temperature approach- 
ing 100° in the shade. I inquired from the American 
Weather Bureau last fall as to the highest temperature 
ever recorded under ordinary Weather Bureau regula- 
tions by their observation station at Fort Yukon in 
Alaska, four miles north of the arctic circle. They 



30 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

replied that the highest temperature at that particular 
place was 100° in the shade. New York City and 
Montreal are both places recognized as frequently un- 
comfortably hot in summer. Yet either of them is 
likely to be cooler on a given July day than is Fort 
Yukon, in the Arctic. 

Any one can find out from the Weather Bureau that 
the temperature in Alaska north of the arctic circle 
has been known to rise to 100° in the shade and I 
imagine any one can find out by writing to the officers 
of the Church Mission Society of the Episcopal Church 
of the United States at 281 Fourth Avenue, ISTew York, 
just how it feels in Alaska when the temperature is 
100 ° in the shade, for that organization has maintained 
a mission and hospital at Fort Yukon for several 
decades. The summer of 1921 I was at Yuma, Arizona, 
when the temperature was 111° in the shade and 
nobody seemed to be suffering. In Chicago or New 
York it is common to see streams of perspiration on 
people's faces, but in Yuma the air is so dry that the 
perspiration is evaporated as fast as the mechanism of 
the skin pours it out. It is well known that in the 
commercial freezing plants low temperatures can b© 
secured by evaporating ammonia, and that doctors can 
freeze the human skin as the basis for minor surgical 
operations by spraying it with a warm liquid which 
produces a lowering of temperature through rapid 
evaporation. Through a similar principle the skin of 
the human body is a wonderful self-cooling device, but 
it works well only in dry climates. At 111° in Yuma 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 31 

we felt almost cool through the rapid evaporation and 
did not suffer. A month later in Chicago at 93° in 
the shade I heard much complaining and believe there 
was a deal of actual suffering. 

The climate which is intolerable in Chicago at 93° 
is the same kind of steaming heat jou have at Fort 
Yukon, Alaska. The summer of 1918 I was con- 
valescent from typhoid at St. Stephen's Hospital at 
Fort Yukon. That summer the temperature did not 
go to 100° but it did go to 97°. The hospital is a 
three-story building and on that day most of us moved 
out of the upper two stories into the cellar. Archdeacon 
Hudson Stuck, who was in charge of the Mission, not 
only slept in the cellar but as near to the cool and damp 
cellar floor as he possibly could. 

I have just consulted a new edition of a widely 
used American school geography and have found the 
statement that "north of the arctic circle it is always 
cold." Either the author is unfamiliar with the 
Weather Bureau records or else he has a peculiar idea 
of the meaning of ordinary English words. 

How far wrong they may be who guess that the 
summer will be cold in places where the winter is cold, 
is strikingly shown by the Encylopedia Britannica 
account of Verkhoyansk, a town in Siberia about Y5 
miles north of the arctic circle. This town is at or 
near the Cold Pole of the earth. It has a minimum 
record of — 93.6° F., which is 125 degrees below the 
freezing point of water, 64 degrees below the freezing 
point of mercury, 39 degrees below the greatest cold 



32 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

recorded at tlie nortli tip of Alaska and 20 or 30 de- 
grees lower than the estimated minimum temperature 
of the North Pole. If summer temperatures were 
necessarily low where the winter is cold, we would 
expect a chilly July at Verkhoyansk. But we find the 
thermometer not infrequently ahove ninety in the 
shade. The maximum record is -\-92.7°, or well above 
the hottest summer days of London or San Fran- 
cisco and presentably hot for July in Rome or 'New 
York. As the sun does not set for weeks in midsummer 
and the nights are consequently hot, it is not surprising 
that certain cereals and garden vegetables can be culti- 
vated at what is (in winter) the coldest spot north of 
the equator. 

3. After considering the minimum temperatures of 
winter and the maximum temperatures of summer, we 
come next to a consideration of the length of the sea- 
sons. It is true, generally speaking, that the farther 
north you go in the northern hemisphere the longer 
the winter and the shorter the summer. However, this 
has far less of a "practical" meaning than is commonly 
supposed. A Sicilian may think that a winter of three 
months' length is intolerable and if he insists that it 
is intolerable you can't very well argue with him, but 
you can at least prove to him that numerous prosperous 
people live in a climate where there are three months 
of winter. There are those who are used to three 
months of winter who insist that six months of winter 
would be intolerable, but you can similarly show them 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 33 

that there are prosperous cities (such as Winnipeg, 
for instance) where you have winter nearly half the year. 
But in Winnipeg you will in turn meet people who say 
that while five or six months of winter is no serious 
handicap to economic development, nine months of 
winter would be insuperable and intolerable. The 
argument is of the same nature and in its essence no 
more tenable than that of the Sicilian who thinks that 
even the shortest winter is unbearable. 

It will be said that you cannot raise wheat or corn 
where the winter is nine months long. That is true, 
but this does not necessarily form a serious argument 
against the value of the l^orth. You cannot raise cot- 
ton in Iowa, but you can raise corn; you cannot raise 
corn profitably in most parts of Manitoba, but it is one 
of the greatest wheat countries in the world; and you 
cannot raise wheat profitably on the arctic circle, but 
you can find something to take the place of the wheat. 
What that something is, we shall leave to be specifically 
answered in a later chapter. The general objection 
must, however, be answered at this point, if only par- 
tially and tentatively. This can best be done by sug- 
gesting a new version and a new application of an 
idea similar to the one Tennyson had when he said, 
"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." 
I shall not contend here, although I may later on, that 
the climate of the ISTorth is such as to make our lives 
delightful to you or me, but shall for the moment con- 
fine the consideration to a "lower" form of life than 
ours — ^that of the plant kingdom. 



34 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

A botanist (I hope the reader will not mind my not 
hunting up his name, for the war is recent and he was 
a German) some decades ago laid down the general 
principle that the gTowth of plants depends not pri- 
marily on the number of months of suitable climate 
but rather upon the number of hours of sunlight. It 
can be shown mathematically that the total number of 
hours of sunlight in a year (if we disregard cloudiness) 
is least at the equator and becomes greater (because 
of refraction) as you go north. Undoubtedly tempera- 
ture has an effect upon rapidity of growth but still 
sunlight as light rather than as heat seems to be the 
main factor. This explains the rhapsodies of the ordi- 
nary tourist who comes back from the Yukon or from 
Alaska with stories which the stay-at-home does not 
believe, but which are nevertheless true, about the won- 
derful size and marvelously rapid growth of the ordi- 
nary garden flowers when they are planted under the 
midnight sun. 

ISTot being a botanist I do not vouch for the state- 
ment, which I believe to be true, that many plants not 
only stop growing during the hours of darkness but also 
are sluggish in resuming their growth when the first 
beams of the morning sun strike them,^ It is something 

5 A botanist friend^tells me that many plants do not grow at all 
during the hours of sunlight, but only during the hours of dark- 
ness. Obviously this could not be true of polar plants, for in 
that case they would not grow at all during the summer, for the 
daylight is perpetual. However, my botanist friend thinks that 
a plant will grow much faster during a night that follows an 
eighteen-hour day than during a night that follows a twelve-hour 
day. There is, accordingly, no disagreement as to the results of 
prolonged sunlight in accelerating growth. 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 35 

like starting a motor car that has been allowed to get 
cold. In midsummer a plant has say thirteen growing 
hours out of the twenty-four in Texas, fourteen or fifteen 
in Minnesota, twenty up on Great Slave Lake, and 
twenty-four hours on Great Bear Lake. Another way 
of stating it is that in the South the plants work single 
shift and in the ISTorth double shift. A plant on the 
arctic circle, therefore, has almost as much growing 
time in one month as it has in two months in the 
southern United States. The northern summer when 
measured by plant opportunities for growth is much 
longer than it may seem to be when you glance care- 
lessly at the calendar. On the north shore of Great 
Bear Lake, just north of the arctic circle, the mos- 
quitoes came out the first week in May, and the lake 
was not frozen over till late in November, 1910-11. 
Measured that way, the arctic summer there that year 
was nearly seven months. Let us call it five, "for con- 
servatism." 

But see what sort of summer we have up there. On 
the Coppermine River north of Great Bear Lake, about 
fifty miles north of the arctic circle, I remember one 
period of three weeks when there was not a cloud in 
the sky, the sun beat down upon us the twenty-four 
hours through, and the heat rose to the vicinity of 90° 
in the shade every afternoon without dropping lower 
than 70° or at the lowest 60° at night. Those three 
weeks were certainly equal in opportunity for plant 
growth to six weeks of Texas, and they were by no 
means the whole summer. The mosquitoes that came 



36 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

out early in May divided their reign with the sand- 
flies that did not cease tormenting ns until in Septem- 
ber. The mosquitoes did come out at the earliest 
spring, but the summer lasted beyond the sandflies. 

Then it is to be remembered that grass does not 
ordinarily spend all the summer in growing. Most 
plants, especially those of a semi-arid climate, growi 
for only a few weeks and then ripen and turn yellow. 
From the point of view of grazing animals they may 
be nourishing and valuable the whole year though they 
grow for only a few weeks or perhaps months. It is 
obvious, then, that the northern summer is amply long 
for the development of the wild forage plants, and so 
it is. This is one of the considerations which show that 
the ITorth is the greatest potential grazing area o£ 
the world, but that is a point we can develop fully only 
a little farther on in this argument. 

4. That the ground in the polar regions is always 
covered with snow, whether winter or summer, is 
another of the widely-spread wrong notions. Before 
going further we must realize that there are two ways 
of looking at this question. If I meet a Mexican and 
ask him, "Is there always snow in Mexico ?", he can 
answer me either yes or no and defend either answer. 
If he says yes, he is thinking about the mountain tops ; 
if he says no, he is thinking about the vast average of 
his country. 

Even in the tropics there is permanent snow on the 
mountain tops if the mountains are high, and even in 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 37 

the remotest arctic regions the snow all disappears 
from the land in summer, unless it is fairly high land. 
Take, for instance, the north coast of Alaska. There 
is a range of mountains commonly considered a hranch 
of the system of the Rockies which runs about straight 
east from Cape Lisburne, toward the mouth of the 
Mackenzie River, leaving to the north a triangular 
coastal plain with a total area two or three times that 
of New York State or a little more than that of Eng- 
land and Scotland put together. This is a real prairie. 
In winter it is thinly snow-covered and the grass in 
most places can be seen sticking up through the snow. 
In summer it is green with grass and golden with 
flowers and there is never a speck of snow. As seen 
from the sea, the mountains to the south of this 
coastal prairie look high, for they rise from low land, 
but their actual altitude is less than six thousand feet. 
In this range you may find some small snowbank in 
a deep ravine or in the lee of a hill that faces north, 
but nothing large enough to justify in ordinary usage 
the name of glacier. You cross this first range of 
mountains and come to a second one nine or ten thou- 
sand feet high. This altitude is great enough and here 
we do have permanent glaciers, although probably none 
nearly as large as those found in the state of Wash- 
ington, the Washington glaciers being larger not merely 
because of greater altitude but also because of much 
heavier precipitation. 

We learn from the school books a great deal about 
the iciness of Greenland, and if we did not learn it 



38 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

from the school books we should learn it from the 
hymn book's "From Greenland's icy mountains to 
India's coral strand." But the hymn book is more 
correct and more careful in its statement than "the 
ordinary geography, for the geography says that Green- 
land is icy and lets it go at that, but the hymn book 
specifies "From Greenland's icy mountains" and that 
is exactly correct. 

The mountains of Greenland are icy and Greenland 
is mostly icy because it is mostly mountainous. It is 
a mass of high mountains in a region of heavy pre- 
cipitation. Just to the east is the Gulf Stream and 
from the warm waters of the Gulf Stream there con- 
tinually rise clouds of vapor that are carried to the 
west and condensed into snow against the mountain 
tops, somewhat as we have a nearly perpetual snow- 
fall upon the high slopes and tops of the Cascade 
Mountains in Washington and British Columbia. 

The Greenland mountains are icy not primarily 
because they are northerly, but rather because the pre- 
cipitation upon them is heavy and because they are 
high. Admiral Peary proved this about thirty years 
ago. Somewhat north of the middle of Greenland he 
climbed into the interior and found, as everybody ex- 
pected, that Greenland there as well as farther south 
is covered with inland ice. He traveled north and 
the season was summer. He was going toward the 
region which is popularly supposed to be coldest and 
iciest and he traveled at first over ice-covered land. 
But he finally came to the end of the ice and snow and 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 39 

found before liiin large stretches of prairies and hills, 
green with grass and golden with flowers, with bumble- 
bees and butterflies and birds and herds of grazing ani- 
mals. Peary was upon the northwest coast of the most 
northerly land in the world, but because it was low- 
land it was free of snow in summer. 

vSince then further exploration of the north of Green- 
land has confirmed Peary's view of the extensiveness of 
these ice-free districts. It is the most northerly pos- 
sible land, so far as we yet know, and that emphasizes 
the generalization which I shall repeat, for it is im- 
portant and admits of no exceptions: Any land, even 
in the tropics, is permanently covered with snow if it 
is very high; and no land, even in the polar regions, 
is permanently covered with snow unless it is high. 
Of course you may have a narrow strip of lowland at 
the foot of glacier-infested mountains, and the glaciers 
may pour out upon the plain, but this lowland ice has 
its birth in the mountains and so the exception to our 
rule is apparent and not real. 

We see then that in northern Alaska an altitude of 
five thousand feet is not enough for perpetual snow 
:where the sun can shine. Ten thousand feet is 
enough. But you have a great deal more snow at the 
ten thousand foot level in the state of Washing-ton or 
the province of British Columbia than you have at 
that level, in northern Alaska or the northern Yukon. 
This is because of difference in precipitation. 

British Columbia is commonly considered the warm- 
est province in Canada, but because of high altitude 



40 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

and heavy precipitation it contains over three-fourths 
of all the permanent snow and ice in continental Can- 
ada. ISTearlj all the rest is in the high mountains of 
the territory to the north — ^the Yukon. 

5. A corollary of the idea that the iN'orth is covered 
with snow even in summer is the one that it is a region 
of heavy snowfall. This is far from being true. If 
you take a map of l^orth America and place your 
pencil near the southwestern corner of Alaska on the 
coast of Bering Straits, you may draw a line east, 
along the south coast some fifty miles inland. When 
you come east to British Columbia your line turns 
south, still keeping fifty or a hundred miles inland. 
When you come near the international boundary your 
line will run east following the boundary between the 
United States and Canada, roughly. This is the line 
of heaviest snowfall. South of that line, generally 
speaking, you have less and less snow and north of it 
you also have less and less snow. 

By the figures of the United States Weather Bureau, 
snowfall in winter in Missouri or Virginia is heavier 
than on the north coast of Alaska, while we believe 
that the snowfall in Virginia or the Highlands of Scot- 
land is many times as great as on the north tip of 
Greenland or on the northerly islands discovered by 
my expedition of 1913-18. 

In the north polar regions there is, then, to begin 
with, very little snow on the ground at the end of 
winter. We have already said that in some parts of 



THE NORTH THAT NEVER WAS 41 

the polar regions the temperature is 100° in the shade 
in the summer. It would have to be a very peculiar 
kind of snow if a little of it, more or less covering 
the ground in winter, would last far into the spring. 
Of course, it does not last long but disappears like 
magic. Eor two or four or five months, according 
to just where you are, you have green prairies and 
flowery meadows that are a delight to the eye and 
would* be delightful to every, senses but for the unbe- 
lievable plague* of insects — mosquitoes, sandflies, horse- 
flies; and the like. In the development of the country 
these will prove a drawback next in seriousness to the 
wall of ignorance that surrounds the northern lands. 
China's wall of masonry was never a very efiicient 
barrier. A wall of misinformation is more effective, 
more difficult to tear down. 



CHAPTER III 
THE FEUITFUL AECTIO 

j^ppAEEJTTiiT on my mere say-so, the following 
chapter asserts about the ISTorth various things which 
are the opposite of common beliefs. Two years ago 
this would have been embarrassing for me. Even those 
who might have admitted that ten years beyond the 
polar circle, traveling on the average two thousand 
miles per year on foot, had given me ample oppor- 
tunity to study conditions up there, could still have 
questioned my veracity or my judgment, if not both. 
But now we can get in one place and in compact form 
weighty if not conclusive support for enough of the 
more essential statements of this chapter so that the 
reader will be inclined to say: "Since the points of 
the argument which I can check have full support, the 
rest of the argument and the conclusions are probably 
all right." 

The authority in question is the report of the Royal 

Commission appointed at Ottawa by Order in Council 

of date May 20th, 1919, to investigate the possibilities 

of the reindeer and musk ox industries in the arctic 

and subarctic regions of Canada. This report traces 

its origin back to a series of letters and interviews I 

42 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 43 

had with the Honorable Arthur Meighen, then Min- 
ister of the Interior for Canada and later Prime Min- 
ister. After Mr. Meighen had become in general con- 
vinced that the subject was important and deserved 
the attention of Parliament, he arranged that I should 
address a joint meeting of members of the Senate 
and the House of Commons. The presentation of the 
case for the great food-producing resources of the 
[N"orth was satisfactory enough to Parliament so that 
Mr. Meighen felt justified in appointing a Royal Com- 
mission to investigate the possibility of domesticating 
the musk ox and of introducing domestic reindeer — ' 
both with a view of making the northern prairies (com- 
monly miscalled "barren grounds") producers of do- 
mestic meats on a commercial scale. I was a member 
of this Commission, but being already prejudiced 
through having lived more than a decade in the llTorth, 
no real judicial function rested in me, but in the other 
three Commissioners only. For this and other rea- 
sons I resigned from the Commission in February, 
1920. 

The Commissioners could scarcely have been more 
happily chosen. Dr. J. G. Rutherford, a veterinarian 
by profession, had become, through a lifetime of study 
and practical work, nearly or quite the leading stock- 
man of Canada. He was chairman. J. S. McLean is 
manager of the Harris Abattoir Company, the leading 
meat packers of Canada. J. B. Harkin is Com- 
missioner of Dominion Parks, and in that capacity 
has charge of Canada's successful work in preserving 



44 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

the American bison, and is a leader in game conserva- 
tion and kindred activities. 

The Commission, during a service of tvf'o years, ex- 
amined thirty-five witnesses — missionaries, fur traders, 
explorers and others — ^men who had spent in the ITorth; 
anything from one to thirty or more years. According 
to their own testimony these thirty-five witnesses had 
spent in the arctic and subarctic regions of Canada, 
or (in a few cases) Alaska or Siberia, a total of two 
hundred and eighty-nine years, or an average of more 
than eight years each. The testimony is many hun- 
dreds of thousands of words. It has, however, been 
admirably epitomized by Doctor Rutherford in a hun- 
dred-page report that has been submitted to the 
Canadian Parliament. This is now a public docu- 
ment, open to all. These are the findings which, sup- 
ported by ample testimony, have given Canadians 
assurance that the glamorous and romantic but eter- 
nally frozen and forever worthless ISTorth is a myth. 
In its place Doctor Rutherford's report has given then! 
a commonplace, but livable and valuable ISTorth. 

This report will support enough of the contentions 
of this chapter and this book (without contradicting 
any of them) to give it a general aspect of established 
truth. If you think some statement extravagant, com- 
pare it with the official report. You may find the re- 
port more soberly worded as to conclusions and recom- 
mendations, for I know and love the ISTorth and Doctor 
Rutherford judges it merely by testimony. But you 
will find the facts the same in this book and in the 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 45 

report, except that the book covers a greater variety 
of subjects than fell within the scope of the Commis- 
sion's inquiry.^ 

It is difficult to see how any of the wrong ideas 
about the ISTorth obtained such wide circulation and 
such a firm hold. But it is especially difficult to see 
how the idea can ever have arisen that the Far ISTorth 
is devoid of vegetation, or that if there is vegetation 
it is only mosses and lichens. An actual canvass of 
the school geographies and a reading of the encyclo- 
pedias will nevertheless leave you with that impres- 
sion. And yet every botanist will tell you that the con- 
trary is true. 

That mosses and lichens everywhere prevail in the 
school book accounts of the Far IsTorth, while in the 
i^^orth itself they are inconspicuous as compared with 
the flowering plants, would seem unbelievable if it 
were an isolated untruth. As a matter of fact the 
school books are full of just that sort of misinforma- 
tion. "We, the common people, believe it, although the 
specialists have always knovni better. 

There is perhaps no more striking instance of mis- 
knowledge than the classic of the ostrich which hides 
his head in the sand when he is frightened. Some 
twenty-three hundred years ago there was living in 
Greece an interesting but not particularly reliable 



1 The report will probably be in print by the time this book is 
published. To secure it, write to the Department of the Interior, 
Ottawa, asking for the report of the Royal Commission on the 
Eeindeer and Musk Ox Industries. 



46 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

writer, Herodotus.^ Apparently he first put in circu- 
lation in Europe the story that there is a bird in 
Africa, gigantic of body and conspicuous on the open 
plain, yet so foolish that when he is frightened he 
hides his head in the sand and imagines that if he 
cannot see his enemy his enemy cannot see him. It 
interested the Greeks greatly that there should be some 
animal so much more foolish than humans, and they 
probably began at once to use this story as the basis 
of what with them corresponded to sermons and edi- 
torials. Children have found the idea interesting, and 
moralists useful ever since. The Romans copied it 
from the Greeks and the Renaissance writers from 
the Romans and we have it in our school books, not as 
a Little Red Riding Hood story which we know to 
be fiction, not as an Alice-in-Wonderland story which 
nobody believes, but as a sober, supposedly scientific 
fact which we believed in our time and which chil- 
dren believe to-day. 

1 believed it for about thirty-five years until I be- 
came the housemate of Carl Akeley, who knows Africa 
at least as well by experience as I do the North. One 
evening after dinner we were talking about big game 
hunting and he remarked that the ostrich is nearly the 
canniest big game animal of Africa, and one of the 
most difiicult to approach. When I said I didn't see 

2 I have tried to clieck up the literature of the ostrich story. 
Although I have found references saying that the story was 
started by Herodotus, I have been unable to find the story itself 
in his extant writings. I have not been able to trace it in the 
classics back beyond Diodorus and Pliny, but it seems obvious that 
the story was already a classic in their time. 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 47 

how it could be very difficult to approach an animal 
tliat stands in the open and hides his head in the sand, 
AJseley replied that he does that onlxjnjhe, hooks. 

I have since asked many African travelers who 
have all said that they never saw anything to lead 
them to helieve that any ostrich ever hid his head in 
the sand when he was frightened. I asked Colonel 
Roosevelt about it once. He replied in substance that 
while in Africa he had been greatly interested in this. 
He had inquired from various white men who had 
never seen any evidence of it, and from various negroes 
who had never heard of it. His comment was: "You 
see, those negroes had not had the advantage of 
American education !" 

Although I accepted for half a lifetime as a fact 
ihe story of the ostrich, I can now see that no testi- 
mony is required, but only a moment's serious thought, 
to show that it could not be true. Just imagme what 
you would do if you were a leopard or a lion or a 
hyena and were hungry in a country inhabited by 
foolish birds that stood around with their heads buried. 
I think if I were a leopard I would go up and bite 
their necks. Obviously every ostrich in Africa would 
be killed within a year if they did not know every 
trick of hiding and fleeing and fighting that is needed 
to get along in this difficult world. 

In spite of common sense and testimony, ostriches 
with their heads in the sand have prevailed in our 
literature for more than two thousand years. So it is 
not particularly remarkable that the mosses and lichens 



48 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

of the ISTorth, witliout any reason in sense or in fact, 
have prevailed in our books for a number of centuries. 

My first year in the Arctic I saw everything through 
a haze of romance and did not for a while realize that 
it was a very commonplace country. But during the 
nine more years I spent there the realization kept 
gradually growing on me that one of the chief prob- 
lems of the world, and particularly one of the chief 
problems of Canada and Siberia, is to begin to make 
use of all the vast quantities of grass that go to waste 
in the l^orth every year. The obvious thing is to find 
some domestic animal that will eat the grass. Then 
when the animal is big and fat it should be butchered 
and shipped where the food is needed. 

On my last polar expedition I sailed north the 
spring of 1913. We did not hear about the war for 
more than a year after it started, and during the entire 
course of the war we received fragmentary and indefi- 
nite news of it only three times during the five years. 
"We came south just in time for Armistice Day. While 
in the !N"orth I had not realized clearly the conditions, 
but on coming south I found that in our absence peo- 
ple in America had been on rations and in Europe 
they had been starving, not only our opponents but 
even our allies. It became pressing then to do some- 
thing to get either the Canadian Government or some 
large corporation to begin the development of the 
meat-producing resources of the ISTorth. This led to 
my advocacy of those plans which have since been 
taken up in Canada and which will be described in a 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 49 

future chapter on what Canada and Alaska are already 
doing in the way of commercial meat production. 

I commenced the advocacy of government action in 
Canada by laying my ideas and tentative plans before 
Mr. Meighen. It did not take me long to convince 
him that the matter was of great importance and that 
it demanded immediate investigation. If the investi- 
gation bore out my contentions it would be of manifest 
importance that something should be done at once. 
The world in general needed more food to eat and 
Canada needed it if not to eat at least to sell. If she 
eould produce food and harbor colonists on her north- 
ern no less than on her western prairies, she had be- 
fore her, in terms of population and wealth, a national 
destiny hitherto undreamt. She must investigate J 
and if the facts justified it, she must act. 

It is said with some truth that Americans are fond 
of bragging, and yet Page was able to write from Lon- 
don to Wilson with equal truth: "We have the leader- 
ship of the world in our hands and we are the only 
people who don't know it." The same mixture of 
self-glorification and over-modesty is found among 
Canadians who make vast but vague general prophecies 
about the great future of Canada and in the next 
breath deny them by under-rating what must always 
be the foundation of power — the geographic extent of 
their habitable and productive lands. Just what does 
it mean to shout loudly, "This is Canada's century!" 
and then say (as one of their leading politicians is 
commonly quoted as having said), "Canada is a nar- 



50 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPHIE 

row strip along the northern frontier of the United 
States, varying in width from fifty to one hundred 
and fifty miles and capable of supporting no more than 
fifteen million people." To have any foundation for 
the idea that Canada will one day he a country equal- 
ing even a third of the United States in population 
you must recognize the productivity and habitability 
of all her territories. Otherwise she cannot have 
square mileage of habitable land equal to or exceeding 
the United States. And you can come to that belief 
only after unlearning most of what most Canadians 
think they know about most of Canada as to climate, 
soil, vegetation, accessibility, and the like. Just now 
we shall proceed to lay one of the corner-stones upon 
which shall rest a new conception of the future of the 
ITorth by considering its fitness to become the world's 
chief storehouse of domestic meats. In general we 
shall talk about Canada, but nearly every statement 
will apply also to northern Siberia, and will have there 
an even wider meaning, for as Asia is larger than 
America, so is arctic Siberia, both in area and re- 
sources, an even vaster country than arctic Canada. 
The prairies of arctic Alaska are only one-tenth as 
large as those of arctic Canada, yet even in Alaska 
our argument applies to an area several times that of 
England and Scotland put together. 

Arctic lands can produce as much meat per acre as 
those stock lands of the south that are too dry for 
cereals, and can, therefore, equal them in the popula- 
tion that is directly fed from the land. But no stock 





























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^ 


juaOt 




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fe 












f 






1 


1 


Pi^f 


1 


I 














ji£ 


i^ 


'v 




^^ 


f 


-*1 

;3 


^ 




r 


^ 




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k..^ 


^ 4 






K 




.,. 




1 



Reindeer, Drift Logs and Tall Grass along the Polar Sea. 




Cotton Grass on an Arctic Meadow. 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 51 

land can equal in production a cereal land, for reasons 
discussed in another part of this book. So far as the 
argument applies, this presages a sparse population for 
the I^orth. But great cities have arisen in deserts 
about mines and oil wells, and the northern lands will 
gain in population according to the luck they have in 
minerals. In another chapter we deal briefly with the 
prospects in that field. 

With respect to the grazing resources of the Far ISTorth, 
we shall take the educated Canadian, American, or 
European as we find him, already misinformed. At 
first he considers it revolutionary and unbelievable that 
the northern half of Canada is a vast pasture. But it 
is true. The world's largest area of gTass lands is un- 
doubtedly in northern Eurasia and to it only is Canada 
second. JSTorthern JSTorway, northern Sweden, northern 
Finland, northern Russia, and northern Siberia are 
mountainous in some parts and forested in others, but 
in general they form together a great prairie land vari- 
ously estimated at from four million to six million 
square miles, or anything from the full size of the 
United States to one and one-half times that area. But 
in northern Canada we have the next largest grazing 
area in the world, one and a half or two million square 
miles of prairie land, equal to half the area of the 
United States. There are some mountains and some 
rocky hills. In some places there are alkali flats with- 
out vegetation and in some places there are forests. 
But in the main it is a verdure-clad prairie. Whether 
in square miles or in tonnage of flowering plants, the 



52 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

grazing areas of the Argentine or of Texas are insig- 
nificant in comparison. 

These grass lands are not only the northern portion 
of the continent but also the islands that lie north of 
Canada, even to the north coast of the most northerly 
of them. The vegetation is only in part of a typically 
polar nature, strange to southerners. In part it con- 
sists of common plants, such as various sedges, blue- 
grass, timothy, goldenrod, dandelion, bluebell, poppy, 
primrose, anemone, and the like. More than 115 
species of flowering plants are known to exist in EUes- 
mere Island, the most northerly of the Canadian is- 
lands. Sir Clements Markham says in his "Life of 
Sir Leopold McClintock" that in the polar regions in 
general there are 332 species of mosses, 250 lichens, 
28 ferns, and Y62 species of flowering plants. In any 
such numerical summary Markham would have been 
safe in saying "more than" for each of these numbers. 
"New knowledge of the polar regions is continually add- 
ing to the number of species no less than to our esti- 
mates of the tonnage per square unit of area. 

The preponderance of flowering plants over non- 
flowering is conspicuous in the number of species, but 
it is more conspicuous in tonnage. I think there can 
be no doubt that for every ton of mosses and lichens 
on the lands beyond the arctic circle there are at 
least ten tons of flowering plants. These are more 
conspicuous not only because they are more numer- 
ous but also because they are less modest in their 
habits of growth. A further difference is that such 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 63 

plants as grasses and sedges grow afresh, every year 
while certain species of lichens cropped by herbivorous 
animals require many years to replace themselves (some 
species from five to ten years). 

The United States Government is just now making 
the first detailed studies of the grazing possibilities 
of that part of Alaska which is arctic — the northern 
third. These have confirmed the views which I had 
published some years earlier to the effect that the 
grazing in the ISTorth, as represented by grasses and 
other flowering plants, is far in excess of that repre- 
sented by mosses and lichens. 

The stockman who learns that vegetation abounds 
in the ISTorth will ask whether you can raise cattle or 
sheep up there. The answer is that you could if you 
wanted to, but it would not pay. During the years 
1918-21 I have talked with many cattlemen in such 
places as Alberta, Montana, and Arizona and it is clear 
that during at least the latter two of these three years 
cattle raising has not paid. The chief trouble is that 
in most of these places you have to feed and shelter 
cattle for part of the year. By the time you have 
plowed the land, planted alfalfa, bought all the re- 
quired machinery, put the hay into stacks, erected 
barns, and fed your cattle, though it be for only two 
or three months in the year, you have put more money 
into them than at present prices you can get out of 
them. 

If it does not pay to raise cattle in Idaho where you 
feed them for three months in the year, it would not 



54 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

pay to raise cattle in the polar regions where you would 
have to feed and shelter them at least six months in. 
the year. But it "would pay famously to raise cattle 
in Montana or Idaho if you did not have to feed them 
or stable them and did not have to worry about the 
possibility of a blizzard coming once every few years 
to kill off part of the herd. Correspondingly there 
should be a profit in raising any domestic animal in 
the ISTorth if that animal required no shelter or feed- 
ing and produced meat that commanded a fair price. 
-We have such an animal in the reindeer. 

The first objection commonly made to reindeer is 

that they are a wild animal. Apparently many people 

have the idea that about the only tame reindeer there 

I are are the half dozen that Santa Claus drives around 

I about Christmas time. But reindeer were domestic 

I before history began. They are as domestic as sheep. 

,The records of China show that in the fifth century 

of our era there were numerous domestic reindeer in 

northern China, and King Alfred the Great tells us 

that when he was king of Britain there were domestic 

reindeer in ISTorway that took there the place of the 

cattle of England. 

Should any one desire evidence of the docility of 
the herds of domestic reindeer to-day, he can find it 
in any library in Chapter 18 of John Muir's delight- 
ful "The Cruise of the Corwin," a book mostly written 
in the early '80's of the last century although not pub- 
lished until 191 Y. Muir is as good an example as 
Burroughs to show that natural history can be fas- 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 55 

cinating without being faked. JSTo one ever seriously 
questioned the accuracy of his observations. In this 
chapter he tells us in substance that many reindeer 
in the herds which he visited in northeastern Siberia 
were as tame as Mary's lamb, and that in general the 
herds were as docile as the average flock of sheep. 

There has been irregularity of usage as to the words 
"reindeer" and "caribou." The usage seems to be 
crystallizing now. We speak of reindeer when we 
mean domestic animals and caribou when we refer to 
those that are wild. There are many kinds of rein- 
deer and many kinds of caribou. In general, reindeer 
are smaller than caribou, but the biological differences 
between the smallest reindeer and the largest caribou 
seem to be less than those between corresponding 
breeds of cattle, as for instance Jerseys and Guernseys 
on one side and Shorthorns and Polled Angus on the 
other. We may be able to tell the difference between 
Jerseys and Guernseys, but it is doubtful if they them- 
selves can or at least do. Similarly, the zoologist may 
distinguish learnedly between caribou and reindeer, 
but they themselves appear imaware of any strange- 
ness. When a band of one meets a band of the other 
they mix with perfect freedom. This characteristic 
is of great value for the animal breeder. The domestic 
reindeer being smaller than the wild caribou, the 
United States Biological Survey looks forward to in- 
creasing by a third or a fourth the weight of carcass 
of the domestic reindeer of Alaska during the next 
ten or twenty years by crossing them with the larger 



56 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

varieties of "wild animals, such as the Osborn caribou. 

Those who have no personal familiarity with the 
polar regions find it strange that these animals flourish 
there. But they are native animals. Each creature 
flourishes best in a peculiar environment of its own. 
Cattle and giraffes can fend for themselves in the 
South, but would die in the ISTorth. Reindeer and 
caribou flourish in the l^orth, but would probably not 
get along very well in the tropics. They are in no more 
need of shelter from a blizzard than a Texas steer 
needs shelter from the rain, nor are they more likely 
to freeze to death than a giraffe is to die of sunstroke. 
The reindeer is no more likely to starve to death in 
the ISTorth because the ground is lightly covered with 
snow part of the time than a fish is to die of thirst 
because the ocean is salty all the time. 

So far as I know^, no man has ever seen any evi- 
dence of caribou being cold in winter or of their 
being seriously incommoded by a blizzard. I used to 
be a cowboy in my early days in ISTorth Dakota. I 
know how cattle behave in a sleet storm, for I have 
more than once followed them as they "drifted" be- 
fore the wind when no one could stop them. The be- 
havior of caribou is just the opposite. Eor more than 
ten years I have in winter made my living in the Far 
ISTorth by hunting them, and as a hunter I know their 
habits even better than I did those of the half-wild 
cattle as a cowboy. If I am hunting caribou toward 
sundown of a winter's day and see a band just before 
dark too far away to approach them while there still 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 67 

is shooting light, and if that evening a storm blows 
up and a blizzard rages for two or three days, as has 
often happened, I look for that band of caribou to 
move about five miles in twenty-four hours directly 
against the wind. If it is a three-day storm, I would 
look for them at the end of it fifteen miles to wind- 
ward and would probably find them there if they had 
not been scared by a wolf meantime or interfered with 
by some special cause, such as open water or a pre- 
cipitous cliff. 

We have here, therefore, animals that are in no need 
of shelter from storm or cold. The only time reindeer 
might conceivably need it would be the calving season 
in the spring. It is true that calves are sometimes 
frozen to death during the first five or ten hours after 
birth, but this happens so rarely that the death rate 
among reindeer calves in Alaska during the last twenty 
years has, according to the figures of the United States 
Department of the Interior, never been as high in even 
the worst years as the average death rate among range 
calves (cattle) in Montana or Alberta. 

!N"ext comes the quality of the meat. This question 
ean be answered in many ways, although none is more 
conclusive than the evidence as to price. 

Stockholm, Sweden, is one of the fine cities of Eu- 
rope with a population of between three and four hun- 
dred thousand people. I wrote a letter to the Chamber 
of Commerce of Stockholm and have received a long 
reply which may be summarized as follows: Reindeer 
meat has been on the market in Stockholm for several 



58 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

decades. Apparently it was looked down upon in the 
beginning as an inferior meat because produced by a 
people looked upon as inferior — the Laplanders. 
Gradually, however, the meat increased in favor, until 
something like ten years ago it came about to the level 
of the various common domestic meats. It is now 
sold in the city by the hundreds of tons each year and 
last winter the average price of reindeer meat ranged 
from equality up to twenty-five per cent, higher than 
that of beef for corresponding cuts. 

Another answer as to the quality of reindeer meat 
is found in the American market. The winter of 
1920-21 the Alaska firm, Lomen and Company, of 
iNome, shipped to the United States sixteen hundred 
reindeer carcasses which were sold to the best clubs and 
hotels for prices between three and four times as high 
as corresponding cuts of beef. At a time when the 
big meat packers were selling the best American beef 
in ISTew York City wholesale at eleven cents a pound, 
reindeer meat was being sold wholesale for thirty-five 
or forty cents a pound, depending on the quantity 
purchased. 

Several hundred typical Americans have now been 
living for many years on reindeer meat in Alaska. 
Once upon a time the city of Nome imported large 
quantities of beef. The import of beef has lessened 
partly because the city gradually lost its population, 
but the beef importation decreased at a far more rapid 
ratio than the population because of the gradual en- 
croachment of reindeer meat, until now the amount 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 69 

of beef imported into ISTome is negligible. It may be 
argued that the price had something to do with this 
change, for in Nome reindeer meat has been somewhat 
cheaper than beef, but any one will find on inquiry 
that the people who live in ISTome do not consider the 
price to be the determining factor, but rather the 
quality of the meat. For every man there who says 
beef is better than reindeer you can now find another 
who says reindeer is better than beef. 

!N'ot long ago I had a conversation with a man who 
had lived in iRome for twenty years. He told me that 
ilSrome, the winter of 1920-21, was about the only place 
on the west coast of Alaska that had any ordinary 
domestic beef. IS'ow and then during the winter, 
visitors came in from out-lying districts where no meat 
was available except reindeer, and my informant said 
he had noticed and had also heard it commented upon 
by others, that the visitors when they went to hotels 
or restaurants seldom ordered domestic beef, as would 
have been the case had they been tired of the reindeer 
meat in the localities where they had been living. Com- 
monly the first meal of meat eaten after arrival in l^ome 
was reindeer meat. This informant said that some- 
thing like three people out of four in western Alaska 
are now of the opinion that reindeer meat is better 
than beef. 

It must be said that this opinion has been gaining 
ground only slowly. When I first ate reindeer meat 
in Nome restaurants (1912) I heard many comments 
to the effect that it was not so nourishing nor so well 



60 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

liked on the average as beef. How the idea started 
that the meat is not nourishing is difficult to say. 
Somebody probably said it and others took it up. That 
the taste was considered inferior was due to unfamil- 
iarity. Through six or eight years of custom the same 
people are now of the opposite opinion. 

However, there will be no difficulty in introducing 
reindeer meat into the United States or into any 
civilized country on the score of prejudice. The thing 
has already been tried out and it is found that the 
demand is vastly greater than the supply. This will 
probably always remain the case, for great as are the 
ranges of the ISTorth they will never supply as much 
meat as the world would like to have. Meat produc- 
tion in other lands will decrease so much more rapidly 
than the northern reindeer production can increase that 
the world's total meat supply in proportion to the 
mouths there are to feed will probably never again be 
as high as it is this year. 

Here, then, we have the answer to the old question, 
"What is the ISTorth good for ?" It is going to become 
the greatest meat-producing area of the world and even- 
tually the only area "where meat is produced on a large 
scale. This will not be because the South could not 
compete with the l^orth if it wanted to, but rather 
because the South is not going to want to compete. 

When I was a youngster, it was twelve or fifteen 
miles from my brother's cattle ranch to the nearest 
ranch to the east and I never knew how far the nearest 
neighbor was to the west. It might have been a hun- 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 61 

dred miles. ISTow the farmliouses in tliat section are 
on the average less than a mile apart and they raise 
cereals where we raised cattle. The same story is being 
repeated everywhere. A good example is the Yakima 
country in Washington. When I first heard of it it 
was a horse country. That memory is preserved by 
the name of a section out there which is the "Horse 
Heaven" to this day. A little later Yakima became a 
sheep country and then it became a country of orchards 
and market gardens. That is the course of events in 
Texas and in the Argentine and in most parts of the 
tropical and temperate zones. The wild lands of yes- 
terday are the vast cattle ranches of to-day and the 
cereal farms of to-morrow, while day after to-morrow 
they will be cut up into market gardens and dairy 
farms and chicken yards and towns and cities. 

Up to the present one of the main reasons for the 
cultivation of stock in such countries as Ohio or On- 
tario has been the value of manure as a fertilizer. But 
the rapidity of advance in chemistry and engineering 
is increasing almost in geometric progression. We are 
already taking nitrogen directly out of the air and it 
will not be long till doing that will be cheaper and 
more convenient than the production of manure for 
our gardens and fields. Then will vanish one of the 
great reasons for the production of beef cattle in south- 
erly climates. Undoubtedly they will for a long time 
be cultivated as luxuries. 

There are various estimates to show the extravagance 
of a meat diet. All agree that if you first feed corn 



62 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

to a hog and then eat the hog you are losing the food 
value of a large part of the corn. Some say you are 
losing six-sevenths of it and others estimate the loss 
as high as thirteen-fourteenths. In any case, it is an 
extravagance — a consideration which will force the 
world gradually toward vegetarianism as the increasing 
population begins to press hard and harder upon the 
sources of food. 

Being fond of a simple diet and of single-course 
meals, I had overlooked one of the advantages of rein- 
deer meat until this was called to my attention by a 
friend who happened upon a copy of a magazine de- 
voted to the interests of cooks and chefs. Here I 
found an enthusiastic article about reindeer meat as 
especially welcome because it introduces variety into 
the rather monotonous meat side of our menus. Though 
this idea struck me as novel and academic, it will 
doubtless appeal to many as practical and important. 
Indeed, I am probably one of a very few who never 
would have thought of this aspect of the case. 

When you come to think of it, there is an astounding 
variety to the cereal, fruit and vegetable side of our 
bills of fare as compared with the monotony on the 
meat side. We have developed elsewhere ^ the prin- 
ciple that a man or dog, or indeed any animal, that 
is used to a large variety of foods will take kindly to 
one more variety, but that a man or animal used to 



3 "The Friendly Arctic," pp. 61-65, and "Food Tastes and 
Prejudices of Men and Dogs," The 8cientifio Monthly, December, 
1920. 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 63 

half a dozen or less varieties of food is very difficult 
to induce even to sample a new variety. The extension 
of this principle would indicate that most of us look 
eagerly for new fruits because we are accustomed to 
many fruits, and are reluctant to try new meats be- 
cause we are accustomed to very few. Personally, I 
think that this factor in the laws that determine human 
taste in food will be important and will operate against 
the introduction of any new meat. It is through the 
good fortune that we are habituated to thinking of 
venison and through the accident that reindeer meat 
differs scarcely at all from beef and ovibos differs not 
at all, that we shall have no difficulty in introducing 
these meats. "While a few people will refrain from 
tasting them, the demand of the others who want them 
will always be in excess of the supply of either or 
both of these meats. 

But against the conservative tendency just men- 
tioned will operate the factors that have caused such 
jubilation over reindeer among the professional chefs. 
If you can once get people to assume the same attitude 
towards new meats that they do towards new vegetables 
and new fruits, there will be a continually increasing 
cry for variety in meats. Within the last few years 
sweetbreads and guinea-fowl and other new meat items 
have been introduced and have become very popular, 
although twenty-five or fifty years ago they aroused 
feelings of aversion and even horror. It is possible 
that reindeer is coming upon the market just after the 
corner has been turned, and that the people who want 



64 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

variety in meats are already becoming more numerous, 
at least in our cities, than those who are horrified by 
variety. From the point of view of these no less than 
the professional chefs, reindeer and ovibos (and indeed 
any other new fish, flesh or fowl) will be welcome. 

People who do not consult the census returns are 
in the habit of laughing at the Malthusian doctrine 
of the increase of the world's population. But those 
who look at the census returns do not laugh. His was 
not a prophecy but a mathematical calculation, and it 
is coming true as rapidly as he said and as inexorably 
as things do which go by mathematical law. Professor 
Raymond Pearl, the chief statistician of the United 
States Food Administration, said during the last year 
of the war that, unless some new source of meat be 
found and if population increases the next half cen- 
tury at the same rate as the last half, steaks will be 
within fifty years as hard to get as caviar is now. He 
had not then thought of the possibility of large-scale 
meat production in the Far ]^orth, but even now he 
has modified his conclusion only slightly. The iN'orth 
will produce great quantities of meat but never nearly 
enough. The most enthusiastic of us do not dream 
that the increase of the northern herds can keep pace 
with the increase of the world's human population and 
at the same time compensate for the decrease of cattle 
in the South as the ranch lands there are progressively 
converted into farms and gardens. 

The grazing experts of the United States Govern- 
ment estimate that you can support permanently in 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 65 

certain parts of Alaska one reindeer for every thirty 
acres of land. This estimate will probably hold in 
general for about two million square miles of Canada 
and Alaska and for between four and six million square 
miles of northern Eurasia. As an absolute quantity 
this means a large supply of meat, but relatively to 
the demands of the world as the world is to-day it is 
not large. With reference to the world of a hundred 
years from now, if we avoid destructive wars and do 
not adopt birth control, this supply, vast in itself, will 
be insignificant. 

But such as it is, it will be the one main source of 
meat supply seventy-five or a hundred years from now. 
So far as I can see, the chief food output of the l^orth 
will be meat until some new food plants are invented 
that can withstand summer frosts. My own family now 
has a farm so far north in Saskatchewan that we lose 
the wheat crops by frost often enough to take up all 
the profit. It is foolish for us to continue raising wheat 
so far north, and eventually no one will try it. The 
cardinal mistake of the northern United States and 
Canada from an agricultural point of view is that they 
are trying to gather grapes from thorns and figs from 
thistles. It is almost as foolish to try to raise wheat 
on Slave Lake, although you can do it, as it would be 
to raise ostriches in Iowa, which you could also do. 

Eventually the animals and plants of such northern 
districts as middle Saskatchewan will not be the plants 
and animals which the colonists are now cultivating. 
They cultivate them now not primarily because the 



66 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

land or climate are adapted to them, but primarily 
through their own conservatism in trying to do as they 
have alvp-ays done and through the conservatism of the 
world markets which demand in general the sort of 
food products they always have had. But unless the 
world begins to manufacture food directly out of the 
air through chemical processes, it will soon have to 
reconcile itself to deriving from every district those 
foods which can there be produced without going into 
violent conflict with natural conditions. 

ISTow and then the newspapers have headlines about 
somebody discovering a new kind of wheat that ripens 
in five or ten days less time than some other. These 
discoveries are chiefly of academic interest, for the 
northward limit of wheat or of any cereal is determined 
not by early autumn frosts but by the sporadic mid- 
summer frosts. There is not much point in breeding 
an earlier kind of wheat. There would be great point 
in doing what probably cannot be done, the developing 
of a frost-resisting wheat. Until that is accomplished 
the northern limit of profitable wheat cultivation will 
remain about where it is now and is more likely to 
move south than north. Rye and oats and other cereals 
can be cultivated a little farther north, but in the coun- 
try to the north of the tree-line none of these can be 
produced at a profit now nor under any commercial 
conditions similar to the present. 

I do not profess to see very far into the future, but 
so far as I can see the ISTorth will not produce any 
food on a commercial scale except fish from its waters 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 67 

and meat from the grasses and other plants that grow 
native and without human encouragement. Because 
it can produce no other food, j&sh and meat wiE be the 
great food products of the ISTorth, and of these, meat 
will for some time he the greater. I do not under- 
value the resources of the ocean; I suppose that the 
time will come when men will begin to farm the seas 
somewhat as they now cultivate the lands. That con- 
sideration I am leaving out for the present. 

But long before that time will come, northern jilaska 
will fulfil the prophecy of E. W. ISTelson, the Chief of 
the United States Biological Survey, who has said in 
testimony before a Congressional Committee that 
within twenty years the annual reindeer output of 
Alaska will be 1,250,000 carcasses per year (equal, 
therefore, to about 3,000,000 sheep, for a reindeer 
weighs more than two sheep). And if Alaska with its 
estimated two hundred thousand square miles of graz- 
ing land can give us an annual turnover of one and 
a quarter millions of reindeer, Canada with its two 
million square miles will give us an annual turnover 
of ten or thirteen million carcasses, the equivalent ol 
twenty-five million carcasses of sheep, which is more 
than the total production of Canada to-day in all 
forms of domestic meats. Canada cannot do this 
within fifty years, for the industry there is just being 
started. It is, however, being started with the advan- 
tage of the Alaskan success before our eyes and prog- 
ress will, therefore, be a great deal more rapid than 
it was in Alaska. 



68 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

Lest it be thought that these prophecies are extrava- 
gant, we shall tell here the story of a prophecy now 
fulfilled. 

In 1903 there were approximately 6,000 reindeer 
in Alaska, the natural increase from 1,280 animals 
that had heen imported from Siberia in small drib- 
lets between 1892 and 1902. In May of that year 
Gilbert Grosvenor, the editor of the National Geo- 
graphic Magazine, wrote for that magazine an article 
in which he prophesied that within fifteen years there 
would be more than a hundred thousand domestic rein- 
deer in Alaska, the descendants of the original 1,280 
animals, and that within twenty-five years reindeer 
meat would appear on the American markets. The 
publication of this article was greeted with a storm of 
ridicule, and especially from Alaska. Grosvenor re- 
ceived one letter, for instance, from a member of the 
United States Geological Survey who said in substance 
that he had practical knowledge of Alaska while Gros- 
venor was only a theorist; that he had seen the places 
which Grosvenor talked about and could assure him 
that no such thing was going to happen ; and that Gros- 
venor was making himself and his magazine ridiculous 
by indulging in any such day-dreaming. 

When the fifteen years were over, the 6,000 reindeer 
instead of having increased merely to 100,000 had in- 
creased to more than 120,000, (and are now estimated 
at more than 200,000, for the herds double in num- 
bers every three years). The meat instead of appear- 
ing on American markets ten years from now, appeared 



THE FRUITFUL ARCTIC 69 

five years ago. At least 10,000 reindeer steers are now 
in northwestern Alaska ready for butchering, but lack 
of cold-storage facilities may prevent the shipping of 
more than from 3,000 to 5,000 to Seattle in 1922. At 
1920 prices the 10,000 are v^orth $370,000 at Nome, 
Alaska, and will be worth $600,000 when they get to 
Chicago, the increase in price covering both freight and 
the profits of middlemen. 

Thus has Grosvenor's ridiculed prophecy come more 
than true. The herds are double what he estimated, 
and the market value of the product is already meas- 
ured in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year ten 
years before he thought the first marketing would 
begin. 

But it is incorrect to speak of "Grosvenor's proph- 
ecy" — it was really an estimate of future increase 
based on past records, and then divided by two "for 
conservatism." Those who disagreed with Grosvenor 
were really denying his facts. For men of a certain 
temperament it is always easy to do that. But the 
facts keep marching on. 



CHAPTEE IV 
THE LIVABLE ]!q^ORTH 

The first chapter of this book was a brief summary 
of world history from the point of view of the north- 
ward march of civilization. This northward march 
has been continually retarded by two classes of ob- 
stacles, the real and the imaginary. Of these the 
Jmaginary have been by far the more formidable. The 
real but secondary difficulty has been that the prob- 
lems of the I^orth have been new problems and that a 
solution had to be found exactly as men had already 
found solutions for such southern problems as irriga- 
tion. The main unreal difficulty has been the fear of 
imagined handicaps. That there has been serious work 
in solving real problems no one will wish to deny; 
this book is attempting to show that the solution has 
been made trebly difficult by mental attitudes for which 
]S[ature should not be blamed. 

We are conquering the difficulties of the ISTorth 

faster as time goes on. It was more than a thousand 

years from the time when the Romans thought that no 

civilization could exist north of the Alps until the 

civilization north of the AJps was really on a par with 

that of Italy. But it was only a century from the 

time when Benjamin Franklin thought that the little 

island of Guadeloupe was worth more than all of 

70 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 71 

Canada until second-rate cities in Canada had become 
more important than the whole island of Guadeloupe. 
It was only a few decades from the time when even 
Seward's friends tacitly admitted that "Seward's 
Folly" was the correct name for Alaska until the Ke- 
publicans began to "point with pride" to the purchase 
and to rank it among the glorious achievements of the 
party. By analogy we may expect ffiat it will require 
only a decade or two for the same progress in knowl- 
edge and revolution in sentiment with regard to the 
northern prairies that are still called "Barren Grounds" 
and are still supposed to be worthless. 

It may be said justly that argument from analogy 
is never safe, and for that reason the second and third 
chapters took up in detail and showed the falsity of all 
the main contentions upon which has been based the 
common view that the North is uninhabitable and 
worthless. It was supposed to be worthless because of 
excessive winter cold, but we have shown that there 
are many prosperous districts now inhabited by Eu- 
ropeans and Americans of our average type of civiliza- 
tion that attain a minimum temperature in winter 
equal to or colder than the minimum temperature re- 
corded for the north coasts of Siberia, Canada, or 
Alaska. It has been commonly supposed that snowfall 
in the North is heavy, but we have shown that the 
snowfall of Virginia or Germany is heavier than that 
of northern Canada or of northern Alaska. 

We have pointed out that the growth of grass and 
other plants is measured not by the length of the smn- 



r-Tt^h^ 



72 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

■ mer in months but by the number of hours of sunlight, 
and that there are as many hours of sunlight in three 
months of arctic summer as in five months of a tropical 
summer, giving the northern plants, therefore, in 
reality almost twice as long a growing time as the care- 
less reasoner assumes them to have. 

It seems to be light rather than heat that makes a 
plant grow fast. But if it were heat, the polar plants 

I would not be badly off. A fairly simple mathematical 

) calculation shows that from the first week of June to 
the second week of July the earth receives from the 
I sun more heat per square mile per day in the north 
polar regions than in the tropics.^ 

If these be startling truths to the layman, they are 
commonplaces to the advanced students of meteorology. 
In a short book, statements must be made pointed and 
brief. Whoever wants a full grasp of the principle 
enunciated in the preceding paragraph, for instance, 
can get it from page 12 of Professor R, de C. Ward's 
"Climate" (a standard text book on climatology). 

But the polar winter at its coldest is about as cold 
as the winters of Montana, Manitoba, or Russia and 
is even longer. We accordingly still have to deal 
with people who say that no ordinary Europeans or 
Americans will ever live in large numbers in a cli- 
mate where the winter lasts through considerably more 
than half the year. Here as in the rest of our discus- 
sion we may well borrow light for the future from a 
consideration of the past. 

1 See footnote to p. 255, post. 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 73 

Some of that light we can get from a romantic but 
little-known story of the administration of President 
Grant. 

The Republican Party had accepted the political 
burden of "Seward's Folly" with not particularly good 
grace. At that time in the unregarded country of Ice- 
land there were violent political agitations against the 
Danes similar to the recent Irish agitations against 
Britain, and a young man by the name of Jon Olafsson 
had written such bitter denunciations of the ruling 
class of Danes that a warrant was drawn for his arrest, 
whereupon he fled the country, escaping to England 
and later coming to the United States. This was about 
the same time that many ordinary colonists left Ice- 
land to settle in Manitoba. Most of the immigrants 
to Manitoba and other parts of America made a living 
from their farms or else by manual labor, but the young 
political exile was a university man of the type who 
preferred to live by his wits. He soon learned from 
the American newspapers that Alaska was a white 
elephant on the hands of President Grant's adminis- 
tration, and this gave him an idea in which, as he told 
me himself later, he had from the start complete con- 
fidence as a source of livelihood for himself for a year 
or two, although he never took it seriously as a thing 
to be carried out. He went to Washington and rep- 
resented to President Grant that the Icelanders are a 
highly civilized and in many ways admirable people, 
but that they are above all Europeans inured to the 
hardships and privations of the 2*Torth and would, 



74 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

tlierefore, make the only people who could be expected 
to colonize Alaska satisfactorily. According to his 
presentation of the case, this was the one chance for 
the Republicans to make Alaska a productive country 
and thus to justify the purchase. As said, Olafsson 
'thimself knew the argument to be pure bunk, for the 
iclimate of Iceland in winter is only about as rigorous 
as that of Scotland, as any one can find out by con- 
sulting the weather bureau records. The average 
American, including President Grant, was, however, 
of the opinion that Iceland was a dreadfully cold coun- 
try and upon this ignorance Olafsson based his scheme 
for securing a pleasant and profitable job. 

The idea struck the President and his advisers fa- 
vorably and they had a ship placed at the disposal of 
the young Icelander, enabling him to travel along the 
various coasts of Alaska. In that connection he also 
made short journeys up some of the rivers and made 
reports that proved valuable with regard to the salmon 
fisheries. Among the varied publications of the Gov- 
ernment are few more interesting than Olafsson's ac- 
count of his summer outings in Alaska. They are 
especially interesting when one knows the romantic 
background. In the way of colonization nothing ever 
came of these reports. Icelanders no doubt can colonize 
Alaska but they have no special fitness for doing so 
and they have never done so. Even in the gold rush 
there were probably not more than three or four of them 
among a hundred thousand people who sought Dawson 
and Nome and the various northern gold fields. Alaska 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 76 

is, however, coming into her omti througli the efforts of 
other nationalities. When I was last on the north coast 
of Alaska there were several people living there who had 
been horn in Portugal, in the southern United States, 
and in the Hawaiian Islands. There were also Nor- 
wegians and Frenchmen and IsTew Englanders. 

Mj father moved into Manitoba several years ahead 
of the railway and at a time when the Government 
in England had about the opinion of Manitoba that 
Grant's administration had of Alaska. The Canadian 
Pacific Railway was being planned, however, and the 
question arose in Great Britain whether Manitoba 
might possibly prove a suitable country for British 
colonists. To determine the facts in the case a com- 
mission of learned men was selected. It sat in Eng- 
land and had the power to summon witnesses from 
Manitoba and the Canadian West generally, to deter- 
mine the climate and resources of those districts and 
to decide the probability of their ever becoming the 
home of a considerable number of British colonists. 
These witnesses were explorers, trappers, traders, and 
missionaries who had, most of them, spent several 
years in the Middle West of Canada and who testified 
about the climate and resources truthfully from ample 
knowledge. 

To inquiries about the minimum temperature of 
winter the committee received the answer that the 
thermometer drops to fifty and fifty-five degrees below 
zero occasionally. "This," said the judges, "is a 
typical polar temperature," and that is correct. Eorty 



76 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

years of Government weather bureau observation on 
the north coasts of Alaska and Canada have confirmed 
this committee in their opinion that minimum winter 
temperatures there are similar to those of southern 
Manitoba. 

With regard to the storminess of winter, the wit- 
nesses testified that now and then there are dreadful 
blizzards. At the beginning of the storm the ground 
may be covered with a foot or two of feathery snow. 
In the violence of the gale this snow fills the air so 
thickly that if you hold your hand before your face 
you cannot count your fingers. Of course, you could 
count them if you had goggles on. When any one says 
you cannot count your fingers in a blizzard he means 
that the instant the eyes are opened they are filled with 
the flying snow and have to be closed again. The testi- 
mony was correct. There are such storms in certain 
parts of the northwestern prairie states and of the mid- 
western Canadian prairie provinces, not every year but 
once or twice a decade. The committee was justified 
in concluding that the blizzards of Manitoba and Sas- 
katchewan are typical polar blizzards. Many others 
have verified that and I can add my testimony, for 
after spending twenty years in !N"orth Dakota and ten 
north of the arctic circle, it is my best opinion that 
at least one blizzard which I remember from ISTortH 
Dakota was worse than any that I have yet seen in the 
Far ITorth. This is testimony amply confirmed by 
the men from Dakota, Montana, and Manitoba who 
now live in northwestern Alaska or northern Canada. 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 77 

On the basis of reliable testimony whieb fills a buge 
volume, the British committee concluded in substance 
that the climate of southern Manitoba and the Sas- 
katchewan is unsuitable for colonization by average 
Europeans and that in such a country no people will 
live permanently except fur traders because they are 
eccentric, missionaries because they are self-sacrificing, 
and Indians because they do not know any better. Btit 
since then there has grown up in the country which 
was the very center of all the testimony the city of 
Winnipeg, with its three hundred thousand inhabitants, 
the third largest city in Canada, the Chicago of the 
Canadian west, and growing as rapidly and substan- 
tially as any city in Canada. 

Since the publication in a magazine of the above 
contrasting of Manitoba's gloomy future as seen in 
the past with its brilliant present as seen to-day, I 
have received many communications on the subject. 
The point of view is important and never seems to be 
too firmly established, so I quote two of these. 

Mr. Lonsdale Green, of 5639 Kenwood Avenue, 
Chicago, has written me in part as follows : 

"Do you recall reading the two books by Sir William 
Butler, "The Great Lone Land" and "The Wild North 
Land?" The first one was written in 1871 and the second in 
1874. I want to quote from the second book, written after 
the experiences of the first. Writing from the location of 
Prince Albert, which was then a waste space, he says: 

" 'Those who in summer or autumn visit the great prairie 
of the Saskatchewan can form but a faint idea of its winter 



78 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPHIE 

fierceness and utter desolation. They are prone to paint the 
scene as wanting only the settler's hut, the yoke of oxen, the 
waggon, to become at once the paradise of the husbandman. 
They little know of what they speak. Should they really 
wish to form a true conception of life in these solitudes, let 
them go out towards the close of November into the treeless 
waste; then, midst fierce storm and biting cold, and snow- 
drift so dense that earth and heaven seem wrapped together 
in indistinguishable chaos, they will witness a sight as dif- 
ferent from their summer ideal as a mid-Atlantic mid-winter 
storm varies from a tranquil moonlight on the ^gean Sea.' 
"Butler was a good writer and the above is a good descrip- 
tion, but there is quite a large city right at the place where 
the above was written, and as Sir William died only eleven, 
years ago he lived to see it." 

My friend, Hamlin Garland, has just called to my 
attention the following passage from pages 110-111 
of his "A Son of the Middle Border" (ISTew York, 
1920) : 

"One such storm which leaped upon us at the close of a 
warm and beautiful day in February lasted for two days 
and three nights, making life on the open prairie impossible 
even to the strongest man. The thermometer fell to thirty 
degrees below zero and the snow-laden air moving at a rate of 
eighty miles an hour pressed upon the walls of our house with 
giant power. The sky of noon was darkened, so that we 
moved in a pallid half-light, and the windows thick with frost 
shut us in as if with gray shrouds. 

"Hour after hour those winds and snows in furious battle, 
howled and roared and whistled around our frail shelter, 
slashing at the windows and piping on the chimney, till it 
seemed as ii the Lord Sun had been wholly blotted out and 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 79 

that the world would never again be warm. Twice each day 
my father made a desperate sally toward the stable to feed 
the imprisoned cows and horses or to replenish our fuel — 
for the remainder of the long pallid day he sat beside the fire 
with gloomy face. Even his indomitable spirit was awed by 
the fury of that storm. . . . 

"We met our school-mates that day, like survivors of ship- 
wreck, and for many days we listened to gruesome stories of 
disaster, tales of stages frozen deep in snow with all their 
passengers sitting in their seats, and of herders with their 
silent flocks around them, lying stark as granite among the 
hazel bushes in which they had sought shelter. It was long 
before we shook off the awe with which this tempest filled our 
hearts." 



While the above quotation from Garland is as truth- 
ful in fact as it is forbidding in tone, it is not the 
whole picture. The book from which the quotation is 
taken does give the whole picture, but it will suffice to 
note here that the very farms over which this particular 
blizzard swept were bought and sold fifty years later 
at prices ranging from two hundred to five hundred 
dollars per acre. For Garland wrote about Iowa. 

The truth to be deduced from all this is that people 
will live in any place if the financial returns are ade- 
quate. If I could promise the readers of this book a 
twenty-five per cent, increase in their wages or a 
twenty-five per cent, increase in the profits of their 
business, a considerable proportion of them (by no 
means all, of course) would move to Iowa, Prince 
Albert or Winnipeg. 

There are many who through long custom have 



80 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

grown to like the climate of Winnipeg. But many live 
there disliking the climate, just as many feeling simi- 
larly live in London and 'New York, Montreal and 
"New Orleans, Calcutta and Petrograd. 

It seems reasonable that even a commission of wise 
men in Britain would be more easily deceived about 
the true future of Manitoba than the Government of 
Canada itself at Ottawa. But eastern Canadian 
opinion even in 1922 is being swayed by great news- 
papers, the editors of which in some cases have never 
been west of Lake Superior and in other cases have 
never been there except in summer. It is not in reality 
remarkable, therefore, that the Government at Ottawa 
in the '70's was misinformed. In order to realize that 
some of the speeches made in the Ottawa Parliament 
against the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway 
were at the time seriously intended and generally be- 
lieved to be sound, one has to appreciate the fact that 
there are between the East and Midwest of Canada 
climatic differences corresponding to South and I^Torth, 
and must remember the principle that the South has 
always been misinformed about the ISTorth and fearful 
of it. Unless we understand how firmly grounded at 
the time were the misbeliefs about the winter cold of 
the Prairie Provinces and its effect upon vegetable and 
animal life, we cannot get a true view of the history 
of that time, nor can we honor as they deserve the 
pioneers of the Lord Strathcona group who had the 
vision to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. 

The speeches in Parliament of Sir Edward Blake 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 81 

and others against the building of the trans-continental 
railway are now classics in Canada and are there the 
best known examples of unconscious humor. The Eng- 
lish language was taxed to its capacity in showing the 
absurdity of the project. The argument said in sub- 
stance that the expense of building the road would be 
so great that even were we to accept the most optimistic 
view of what resources the prairie provinces might de- 
velop, a reasonable freight tariff to the Atlantic would 
never pay for the axle grease of the freight cars. Op- 
ponents of the road were willing to concede that if 
anybody had the incredible folly to squander that 
much money the road could be built. They admitted 
further that it could undoubtedly be operated in sum- 
mer; but it was preposterous to suppose that it could 
be operated in winter. There followed the self-evident 
conclusion that the railway could never be profitable, 
for "no enterprise can be profitable if it is operated 
only half the year." 

It is hard to realize that this argument was once 
applied in good faith to what is now with some justice 
called "the bread basket of the world" and to a railway 
which is commonly conceded to be one of the greatest 
of all railway systems. Few investors in railway securi- 
ties are more fortunate than those who own Canadian 
Pacific shares. The enterprise made many of its 
builders fabulously rich, laid the basis of a prosperity, 
on the average high, for tens of thousands of homes 
in the "desolate wilderness" through which it passes, 
and maintains passenger and freight schedules as re- 



82 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

liable and a service in every respect as good as any of 
the great railway systems of tiie world. 

About the most fundamental proposition in esthetics 
i is that we like what we are used to. People of a south- 
ern origin, on the average prefer warm climates, and 
most Europeans and Americans live in countries where 
there is summer more than half of the year. There is 
also in such places as Italy and Florida a carefully 
planned campaign to "sell climate" to the rest of us. 
It is, therefore, not strange that the words "a good 
climate" should be synonymous with "a warm climate" 
in the public mind. But when one stops to think about 
itj doubts at once appear. 

"By their fruits shall ye know them," is the prin- 
ciple on which to judge climates no less than cabbages 
and kings. 

In the early part of the seventeenth century there 
were in England people now known as Puritans or 
Pilgrims who were not locally popular and were forced 
to emigrate. Some of them went to the West Indies 
and some to Massachusetts. If you had inquired at 
that time from the man in the street in London he 
would have said that the Barbadoes have a good and 
[Massachusetts a bad climate. But whatever we now 
think of the comparative "goodness" of these climates, 
the average reader will readily admit that he knows 
little about the subsequent history of the colonists who 
went to the West Indies and that probably most of 
their descendants would now fall under the classifica- 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 83 

tion of "poor white trash," while the descendants of 
the Plymouth colony are commonly considered to have 
been the backbone of the American nation and are sup- 
posed to have furnished a high percentage of the men 
who made our present-day western civilization. 

In the war of 1776-83 the American colonists were 
not a unit in their opposition to Great Britain. Those 
of them who in that struggle were known as Loyalists 
or Tories found their situation unpleasant after the 
war, and many of them emigrated, some to the Mari- 
time Provinces of Canada and others to the West 
Indies. The man in the street would again have said 
that those who went to Canada went to the worse cli- 
mate. But the descendants of those who moved to the 
West Indies have made but slight impression on his- 
tory and are now in the main lost to view, while those 
who went north have furnished one of the most impor- 
tant elements that went to building the Canadian nation. 
To-day their descendants are in positions of power and 
prominence and are developing a civilization and a 
government that the world has to reckon with. 

When we stop to analyze the expression "a good 
climate" we find that what we really mean is a good 
climate for loafing. Secondarily we may mean a cli- 
mate where all sorts of vegetation flourish rankly. 
Without denying the value to the world of coffee and 
cotton and sugar, we are constrained to admit that the 
most important crop of any country is the people. ISTo 
climate can rightly be considered good, though bananas 
and yams may flourish, if men decay. Human energy, 



84 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

mental and physical, is developed to the highest degree 
in the northern climates. It may also in some cases 
be developed to a high degree in southern countries, 
notably on plateaus and where the sea breezes blow 
freshly. 

We need not go into such elaborate arguments as 
those of Ellsworth Huntington's book "Climate and 
Civilization" to prove to any thoughtful man that so 
long as we have a competitive civilization and so long 
as public opinion continues to allow the energetic and 
the powerful to take whatever they wish from the 
lethargic and the weak, so long will the ISTorth con- 
tinue to dominate the South as it is doing to-day, for 
it produces the one crop that matters — men of un- 
sleeping energy and restless ambition. 

On the principle of esthetics referred to above — 
that, generally speaking, we like what we are used to 
— we would expect to find a substantial majority of the 
population preferring summer to winter in any coun- 
try where we have summer more than half the year, 
and a substantial majority preferring winter to sum- 
mer in any country where we have winter more than 
half the year. If you make due allowance for the 
powerful effect of the organized advertising of the 
South through commercial mediums and the unin- 
tended glorification of the South through the fact that 
the literature we have inherited (a product of the past 
and not the future) was mostly composed in southern 
countries — when you have made these and some other 
just allowances for forces that influence opinion, you 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 85 

will see in a canvass of any country that summer or 
winter are preferred by tlie population roughly ac- 
cording to this principle. !N'ot to burden the argument 
with too much proof, we shall consider merely the two 
typical northern communities the information about 
which is most readily accessible to the readers of this 
volume. We shall take one community from the north- 
ern prairie and another from the northern forest. 

Judge G. J. Lomen has recently been appointed by 
President Harding judge for the Second Judicial Di- 
vision of Alaska. He is a typical American, born in 
the Middle West, educated at the State University of 
Iowa, and was for some time a resident of Minnesota 
and a member of the Legislature of that state. But 
he had the pioneer spirit and the fever of the 1900 
gold rush got into his blood, so he moved to Kome, 
Alaska, and has lived there for twenty years. A year 
ago I had a conversation with him from which I 
gained the information about to be given. For fear 
my memory might not be quite correct, I have checked 
it by submitting the draft of the present statement to 
his son, Carl J. Lomen, who has also lived in ISTome 
for twenty years, but who happens to be now on a 
visit to ISTew Tork. 

At the peak of the gold rush ISTome was a city of 
thirty or forty thousand inhabitants. Later when sub- 
stantially normal conditions prevailed, it was a city 
of ten thousand or more. Property passed gradually 
into the hands of larger and larger corporations, and 
machinery began more and more to take the place of 



86 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

hand lalwr, reducing the population of the community 
correspondingly. Then came the war with ita rise in 
prices of goods, which really means a drop in the value 
of gold, and there had to follow an exodus from the 
gold country. 

When ]^ome had dropped to a town of about two 
thousand inhabitants, it was so well known to Judge 
Lomen that his conversations and inquiries practically 
amounted to a taking of a vote of the whole popula- 
tion as to whether they preferred winter or summer, 
and he assures me that while no actual count was 
made, the opinions expressed to him indicated that 
with men, women, and children all voting, at least 
three out of four would have cast a ballot in favor of 
the winter climate of the l^orth as compared with the 
summer climate. It must be remembered that in point 
of birth and ancestry of its citizens J^ome is a typical 
American town — its people born in the United States, 
Canada, and the various European countries. There 
are also a few negroes and Asiatics. 

There are many who have business in Alaska but 
who live in San Francisco or other southerly places. 
It is common to hear these people say that the summer 
climate of Nome is delightful, but that they would not 
live there in winter for any money. They have either 
never tried it or have wintered there only once. Few 
will like a northern climate the first year who are 
brought up in a southerly one, and it is merely in 
accord with our principle that these people would not 
like their one northern winter. That they do consider 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 87 

the summer climate pleasant is the significant thing, 
for the people who have lived in Nome for fifteen or 
twenty years and who know the winter as well as they 
do the summer are seventy-five per cent, in favor of 
winter. If you admit the testimony of those who have 
heen in ISTome only in summer to prove that the sum- I 
mer climate is pleasant, you will have to allow the 
testimony of those who have lived there many years to 
prove not only that the winter is to them pleasanter than 
summer, but also that the winter is entitled to he consid- 
ered from an absolute point of view a pleasant season. 

IN'ome has in summer a climate strongly affected by 
the ocean. In winter Bering Sea is in the main frozen 
over and at that time the climate is that of a northern 
prairie, or substantially that of Dakota. The winter 
temperature is in fact nearer to that of South Dakota 
than of ISTorth Dakota, for fifty below zero is rarely 
recorded and there are few winters that go lower than 
forty-five degrees below zero. 

But the city of Dawson in the Yukon is in the moun- 
tains and in a forest. The temperature there in win- 
ter drops about fifteen degrees lower than it does at 
]!^ome and lower than any inhabited part of the 
United States except certain cities and towns in Mon- 
tana. In talking with the "sourdoughs" of the Yukon 
you may get the impression that seventy and even 
eighty degrees below zero have been recorded, but the 
Canadian Weather Bureau, which has maintained ob- 
servation stations there for more than twenty years, 
will vouch for nothing lower than sixty-eight below, 



88 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

which is the same figure as that given by the American 
Weather Bureau for the village of Gladstone near 
Havre, Montana. Dawson, then, has the "continental" 
type of winter climate and it also has that type of 
summer climate, for the thermometer goes to the 
vicinity of one hundred in the shade. This is the time 
when flowers and vegetables grow so rapidly at Dawson 
that their development seems magical even to those 
who know the tropics. 

The weather bureau records of Dawson are not sig- 
nificant from our present point of view, for they are 
in stark figures and these have no direct bearing on 
the question of whether people do or do not like the 
weather. To find out about that you must ask people 
who have been there, rather than meteorologists or 
statisticians. I have talked with hundreds of men 
who have lived there but shall quote only the typical 
opinion of Mr. D. A. Cameron, to-day the manager of 
the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Toronto, but for- 
merly, for many years, manager of the branch of that 
bank in Dawson. Being a great city, Toronto has a 
climate that is well known. It is generally said to be 
similar to that of Cleveland, which many consider 
better than Chicago, for instance. At dinner in Mr. 
Cameron's home I once inquired whether he preferred 
I the winter climate of Toronto to that at Dawson and 
I received the reply, "There are no two opinions in this 
family. My wife and daughter agree with me; we 
all prefer the winter climate of Dawson." Mr. Cam- 
I eron went on to say that that was the general opinion 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 89 

of those whom he knew who had lived in Dawson two 
or more years, or in other words had lived there long 
enough to get over the predisposition in favor of a 
^'temperate" climate they had brought with them from 
a country where summer is longer than winter. 

The "popular" explanation of why the people of 
Dawson complain less of their "severe" winters than 
others do of weather less cold, is that there is a funda- 
mental difference between cold as registered by a 
thermometer and as registered by your skin. We dis- 
cuss "sensible" cold and utter much bromidic wisdom 
about its not seeming cold "because it is so dry." 
[Admitting all that may be said about "sensible" cold, 
there remains the fact that most healthy persons who 
live mainly outdoors in such a climate as Dawson 
get to liJce cold as cold. 

While we have for Dawson no systematic inquiry 
like that of Judge Lomen for ISTome upon which we 
can base a statement of probable percentage of a vote 
as between the climates of summer and winter, we 
have adequate evidence to show that not only do the 
residents of Dawson prefer the polar winter to winter 
on the Great Lakes in such places as Toronto and Chi- 
cago, but they also, as a matter of personal comfort, 
prefer the extreme cold of the Yukon winter to the 
extreme heat of the Zukon summer. 

Obviously the reason why those who are used to 
both prefer extreme cold to extreme heat is not that 
cold is in itself pleasanter. The reason is rather that 
we have made nearly perfect a series of inventions 



90 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

which protect us against the cold. Within doors and 
even without we can neutralize the cold by lighting a 
fire ; we can shut it out by building houses and by put- 
ting on clothes; and we can keep warm by eating 
suitable food for internal fuel and by taking exercise 
to speed up the bodily functions. But what can we 
do against the heat? We may wear a helmet or carry 
a parasol; we may dress in Palm Beach suits and live 
mainly on tomatoes and lettuce, and even at that there 
are few who bear the heat of midsummer without 
complaint whether it be in Texas or Iowa, in Win- 
nipeg, Edmonton, or Dawson. The poorest hovel has 
a suitable means of dealing with the winter cold, but 
there are not half, a dozen of the most luxurious hotels 
in the western hemisphere that have an adequate cool- 
ing system to meet the distress of July. Even the 
poor can fight the cold successfully; it is only the rich 
whose circumstances allow them to flee the heat. 

It is my experience that when I tell a man that 
two thousand people in !N^ome prefer winter to sum- 
mer, I thereby do not succeed in proving to him that 
winter is pleasant, but only that there are two thou- 
sand exceedingly eccentric people living at ]N'ome. We 
are scarcely laboring the point, then, by citing morei 
testimony. 

Dr. E. W. l^elson is Chief of the United States 
Biological Survey and by profession a naturalist and 
a student of climate and of its effect upon plants and 
animals and man. Dr. ItTelson now lives the larger 
part of the year in Washington, but he has experienced 



J' 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 91 

the winter climate of Florida and other parts of the 
southern United States and owns a farm in California. 
Many years ago he spent four winters near the north- 
west corner of Alaska. In the Cosmos Club in Wash- 
ington I asked him a year ago whether he preferred 
the climate of Washington or of California to the cli- 
mate of Alaska. He paused before answering, "If I 
were to speak offhand and as I feel, I would say that 
I preferred the Alaska climate to any in which I have 
lived. But it may be that what I am thinking of is 
not really the climate itself but rather how I felt while 
up there. I have never in my life either before or 
since been so exuberantly healthy, and you like it 
anywhere if you are in exuberant health. Accord- 
ingly, I will not say that I prefer the climate of Alaska 
to the climate of Washington or California, for I prob- 
ably should not if I went there at a low stage o£ 
vitality. But I will say that I spent much of my time 
outdoors both winter and summer while there and that 
I have never enjoyed myself so much year in and year 
out as I did the four years in Alaska." 

Dr. ISTelson said, in other words, what may be stated 
as follows: The northern winter is not pleasant for 
lying around outdoors in idleness. It is a climate for 
activity, not only because you enjoy that sort of cli- 
mate if you are active but also because activity be- 
comes second nature and a joy when you live in that 
sort of climate. A quotation from a friend of mine 
is another way of saying the same thing: "When I am 
spending January at Miami I want a cocktail before 






92 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

dinner, but I never do at Lake Placid or in Algonquin 
Park." 

That the opinions of men who live in the ISTorth 
differ inevitably from those of explorers and tourists, 
is seen to-day whenever we come in contact with em- 
ployees of the Hudson's Bay Company or trappers who 
have resided in the polar regions. It happens occa- 
sionally that the opinions of experienced whalers and of 
officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police agree 
with those of the tourist and explorer, hut in such cases 
it will be found that the tourist point of view appears 
only among officers who have spent their arctic winters 
in (what they considered) the comfort of their ships 
or barracks. Those whalers and policemen who have 
hunted extensively or made outdoor journeys agree gen- 
erally (in my experience) with the fur traders and 
trappers. 

That this is not a peculiarity of the twentieth century 
is shown interestingly by a manuscript of the thirteenth. 
^'The King's Mirror" (Speculum Regale) was written 
by a scholar who may not have visited Greenland but 
who (all critics agree) was familiar with Greenland 
through conversations with men who had lived there, 
and probably also men born there. So far as I know, 
this document is not available in English. I have, ac- 
cordingly, myself translated from the thirteenth century 
Old I^orse sections of Chapters 19 and 21 to indicate 
what men who had lived in Greenland thought of it, 
no less than to show what scholars of eight centuries 
ago thought of the habitability of the polar regions and 



THE LIVABLE NORTH m 

of tlie tropics. I have based this on the AM Codex 243, 
Folio B, as published at Munich in 1881 bj Dr. Oscar 
Brenner. 

Chapter 19. 

"But those who have written about the nature of the world 
in the manner of Isidore and other learned men have said 
that in the heavens there are certain zones under which the 
earth is uninhabitable. One of those is so hot that no one can 
live there because of heat and scorching, for whatever there- 
under is will burn. . . . Men have also said that there are twa 
zones in the heavens the lands under which are so cold that 
because of the cold it is no easier to dwell vinder them than it 
is to dwell under the other because of the heat. In these zones 
the cold has so much power that the water renounces its ordi- 
nary nature and turns into ice and all the lands cover them- 
selves with glaeier. The like is true of any seas that may lie 
under this belt. It would seem from this (theory) that there 
are five zones in the heavens, — the land under two of them 
habitable and under three of them uninhabitable. 

"All the lands are habitable that lie between these zones of 
freezing and burning. It seems reasonable that of these lands 
some are warmer than others and these lie nearer to the zone 
of burning. But those lands which are cold lie nearer the 
zones that are cold, for there frost can exert its power. . . . 
It is considered certain that Greenland lies on the outer 
margin of the world to the north and I do not believe that 
there is any land beyond it, but only the great ocean which 
encircles the world. . . . But as you (my son) enquired 
whether the sun shines in Greenland and if the weather is 
fair as in other lands, I want you to understand for certain 
that the sun shines there gloriously and the country is con- 
sidered in general to have a good climate. But there is a great 
difference between day and night, for when it is winter, nearly 
the whole of it is one night. And when it is summer nearly 



94 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

all of it seems as if it were one day. When the sun is highest 
in the sky, it gives much light and cheer but no extreme heat. 
Still it has enough power so that where the ground is thawed 
(i.e., where there are no glaciers) she warms up everything so 
that the earth produces valuable and fragrant plants. People 
may therefore well inhabit that land. . . ." 



Chapter 21. 

". . . As you have said that it seemed to you strange that 
the land (Greenland) should have weather that could be called 
good, I will tell you how this is. When evU weather happens, 
it may take on more violence than common in other lands by 
reason of strong wind, keen frost and quantity of snow. But 
usually this bad weather is in short spells and there are long 
periods between, when the weather is good although the climate 
is cold. (This cold) is due to the nature of the inland ice." 

Any one who is a specialist is continually astounded 
by the colossal ignorance of the whole world upon his 
specialty, be it epidemiology, electricity, or polar re- 
search. On railway trains I ride in drawing rooms, 
which I cannot afford, and in hotels I shut myseK up 
in my room to avoid answering everlastingly the same 
series of questions, one of the most obnoxious of which 
is whether I do not suppose that I like the E'orth 
chiefly because I am of ISTorse descent. For one thing, 
my descent is partly Irish and that much at least of 
my blood is not particularly northerly. For another 
thing, there is no real reason to suppose that Nor- 
"wegians or Swedes or any other northern nationality 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 95 

get along better in the ISTorth than those from southern 
countries, except in so far as they are less obsessed by 
a fear of the North and are in the beginning a little 
more familiar with the technique of how to remain 
comfortable in that sort of climate. And still it can- 
not be supposed that people brought up in Norway or 
Iceland would know how to deport themselves in really 
cold weather, for they do not meet cold weather in 
their own countries, except perhaps a few who live in 
the higher mountains. 

If you want any evidence to show how little Nor- 
wegians understand about being comfortable in a polar 
climate, take the narratives of their polar expeditions. 
The best example is Nansen's "Farthest North," a 
delightful book, full of adventure and illumined by 
literary charm. By his own telling, Nansen must have 
been extremely uncomfortable in the North; and if 
that is clear it is no less clear that his discomforts lose 
nothing in the telling. Then turn to Peary (of 
American-French descent) whose immediate prepara- 
tion for his northern work was surveying in Nicaragua. 
Peary did have hard times at first, but he got through 
that stage of his work more quickly than his Norwe- 
gian competitors. But perhaps that may not seem 
quite so striking as the fact which ought to be well 
known that the Duke of the Abruzzi with an expedi- 
tion largely Italian followed in the footsteps of the 
Norwegians, and in a short voyage, which did not give 
them time enough to acquire in the North much knowl- 



96 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

edge of the technique of northern work, nevertheless 
exceeded the best ISTorwegian records. 

The scientists tell us that life first had its beginnings 
in the seas and morasses. Land not covered or sponge- 
soaked in water had no plant or animal upon it. Then 
(perhaps because the ocean was crowded) some of the 
seaweeds learned to become land weeds ; sea animals be- 
gan to make furtive excursions ashore and thus snails 
and amphibians were developed. Doubtless these early 
land-pioneers were then looked upon as unfortunate if 
they had been crowded out of the water, or foolish if 
they had left it voluntarily. Possibly those opinions 
may still be held among the plants and animals of 
the sea. 

Though the scientists agree that life had its first 
birth in the water, they are not at one as to where on 
this earth it happened. Commonly we assume it was 
in the tropics. Others say the tropics were then too 
hot for life and that it must have originated near the 
poles. But they are rash who speak confidently about 
the temperature limits between which life may exist. 
Little as we yet know about the fundamental nature of 
life, we do know that living things grow and perpetuate 
their kind in the hot springs of the Yellowstone at a 
temperature near boiling, and in snow on the floating 
ice of the polar ocean at 50 degrees below freezing. 
While we may hazard a guess that life probably 
started at a warmth halfway between the known ex- 
tremes of life temperatures, it would be rash to say 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 97 

it cannot have started at the equator or the pole hecause 
of the heat of the one or the chill of the other.^ 

But our sciences are in hazy agreement that in 
known times terrestrial life-forms are traceable farthest 
hack in tropical regions. There live (with a few ex- 
ceptions) our most ancient and aristocratic families 
of worms and birds and beasts. Among mammals at 
least we have only comparative newcomers in the polar 
lands. The polar ocean contains many forms that are 
considered among the most ancient of water dwellers. 

Whether some fundamental urge, some inherent ten- 
dency of the common life stuff, drove plants and ani- 
mals from the sea to the land (possibly because they 
were capable of a higher development on land) has, so 
far as I know, remained to this day an uninvestigated 
problem. 

But the other question, of why and how plants and 
animals move from a warmer to a colder region but 
seldom or never back, has been studied if not solved. 
Eor the present, we have little light on the why. Sev- 
eral students have discussed for us the particular ani- 
mals that have moved from the steaming lowlands to 
the cool mountains (probably as the mountains were 
developing) and from the tropics to "temperate" and 
"frigid" lands. The most readily accessible writings 
on this subject are those of Dr. Frank Chapman whose 
style is as lucid as his facts are definite. He shows in 

2 For some account of animals that can stand repeated alterna- 
tion of heat and cold from 70 degrees F. below freezing to the 
vicinity of boiling, see "Heart of the Antarctic," by Sir Ernest H. 
Shackleton, Vol. IT, pp. 239ff. 



98 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

particular how birds will througli centuries force their 
way higher and higher up a mountain, adapting their 
bodies to the cooler weather as they climb, but have 
never been knovTU to undertake a similar fight to force 
their way down a slope or into a sweltering jungle. 

It has been shown that "cold blooded" animals, such 
as reptiles, will stand a falling much better than a 
rising temperature. If the normal heat of the environ- 
ment is, say 90° F., the animal will probably become 
sluggish without dying if the temperature drops to 
40 ° F., and remains there for a considerable period, but 
will die if it rises to 140° F., and stays there. 

The power of the human body to adapt itself to 
changed conditions is similar to that of the birds 
studied by Chapman. It is a commonplace in Eng- 
land that the sons of the princes of India acquire not 
only European culture but stronger bodies at Oxford, 
while the sturdiest English stock decays on the plains 
of India. Gandhi and Tagore may blossom there to 
genius and may live to an old age, for they are of the 
stock that had not fought its way north, but Kipling 
was sent to England for his schooling, and he would 
have sent his children to grow up in England had he 
remained in India. There are, of course, social and 
other reasons why Englishmen in India send their 
children to England. But over and above these is the 
climate to which few Europeans have been long ex- 
posed without at least a taint of physical and mental 
degeneracy. The Englishmen in ITew Zealand have 
their native climate with them and are bringing up, 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 99 

and educating there, families that for every sturdy men- 
tal and physical virtue are the full equals of any of their 
neighbors' children that for social or family reasons 
may have been sent home to the Old Country. 

We may argue (though scarcely successfully) that it 
is for social reasons rather than climatic that there has 
grown up in the Indian civil service the uniform cus- 
tom of sending children back to England. So, let us 
rest no conclusion on the India-England case (since 
one authority in ten may dispute it) and turn to a situ- 
ation not one in a hundred will dispute — that tropical 
people are usually healthy in "temperate" regions, 
while arctic people are not usually healthy in the tropics 
or even in the "temperate" zones. 

The negroes who now live in the United States are 
as healthy and energetic as those who live in tropical 
Africa or in Central America. The negroes who live 
in Michigan are on the average as healthy and active 
as those that live in Louisiana or ISTicaragua.^ But 
although not one in a hundred would dispute this, there 
is a still less debatable case. 

In the arctic whaling fleet that used to sail from 
!N^ew Bedford and San Erancisco there was always a 
considerable percentage of "colored" men of the foUow- 

3 During the writing of this book the following interesting 
letter has come from E. C. Hathaway (P. 0. Box 793, Philadel- 
phia) : 

"I am reading . . . your articles (in the World's Work) on 
*The Resources of the Frozen North.' 

"In the last article you speak of the adaptation of the people 
from the South Seas to arctic climate, as well as Portuguese, 
Italians, etc. 

"In the ante-bellum days when the Underground Road was in 



100 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

ing classes : negroes from the southern states, from the 
Cape Verde Islands and the Canaries; and South Sea 
Islanders from Eiji, Guam, Samoa and the Hawaiians. 
Many of these found their first winter in the Arctic 
disagreeable because they did not know how to dress 
and take care of themselves. But they got to like the 
Arctic, which is shown by most of them re-shipping 
on whaling voyages. However, their liking or dis- 
liking the arctic is beside the point. The point is that 
by the uniform testimony of the whaling captains (con- 
firmed by Peary and other explorers who had negroes 
in their crews) these tropical people were as healthy 
on the average as were the sailors of European ancestry, 
and both were as healthy in the arctic (usually more 
so) as in ISTew Bedford or San Erancisco. 

'Now compare this with the cases of Eskimos brought 
south. This has seldom been tried, for the results have 
been so disastrous. An attempt made by Peary is 
typical. We quote Dr. Ales Hrdlicka: "Anthropologi- 
cal Papers, American Museum of JSTatural History," 
Vol. 5, part 2: 

"In 1896 Lieutenant Peary brought six of tlie Smith Sound 
natives to New York, and they were housed in the Museum. 
However, scarcely had they arrived when the majority of them 

operation from the Southern States through to Canada there 
were a great many negroes who escaped into the Dominion. 
These men founded a colony near Woodstock where they and 
their numerous progeny lived. In the northern part of Maine 
and Canada you will find them now working on lumher operations. 
It used to seem rather strange to me to see negroes with the 
skin pigmentation provided for a tropical climate stand the cli-' 
mate hetter than white men. It is a fact, however, that they 
do, and they make most excellent lumbermen." 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 101 

began to cough and became infected with the bacillus of tuber- 
culosis. Within less than nine months four of them died from 
acute phthisis, one had to be sent back, the same fate threat- 
ening, and one, a boy of about eight at that time, after having 
been adopted and brought up in New York and after having 
passed through the initial stages of lung, as well as light 
grades of gland and skin tuberculosis, was, at his demand, 
also sent back to his native country." 

It is not simple to explain why plants or animals 
may migrate north and not south, but we can easily 
explain in the scientific patois o£ to-day why the 
negroes can move north, why the Eskimos cannot move 
south, and why the English can more easily move north 
than south. The keys to the problem are those magic 
words of our twentieth century scientific jargon micro- 
organisms and immunity. 

In the E'orth the uncivilized Eskimo lives his life 
of exuberant good health in a comparatively germfree 
atmosphere. He is not frequently attacked by germs 
and so neither he nor his ancestry have developed im- 
munity against them. When you bring him south, he 
is attacked by hosts of strange germs and his sturdy 
good health either crumbles before their first charge or 
succumbs to their persistent siege. 

In the South the negro fights from infancy arrays 
of the deadliest germs and so have his ancestors before 
him. There has been developed both an individual 
and a racial immunity. When the negro or South Sea 
Islander moves to the north coast of Alaska or Siberia 
he leaves behind his enemies of the microbe class and 
meets instead (for a part of the year at least) the 



102 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF E^VH'IRE 

strange new enemies of snow and cold. We under- 
stand little as yet how to protect an individual or 
race against germs. Our immunology and preventive 
medicine are still in their infancy and so we cannot 
guarantee the southgoing Eskimo against germ attack. 
But we can guarantee the negro against his new 
enemies of the frost, for we have fought cold and storm 
successfully for thousands of years, and can show him 
how to protect himself. 

We do show him. We teach him to dress in woolens 
and furs, to make fires for warmth and to build houses 
that store up for comfort and safety the warmth the 
fire has made. These and other tricks the South Sea 
Islander acquires in his first year on a polar coast and 
has begun to feel himself at home there by the begin- 
ning of the second. By that time the southgoing 
Eskimo has died of some germ disease in "New York. 

The human body has a normal temperature not far 
from 98° E. and must be kept about that level. But 
the weather is sometimes warmer and sometimes 
cooler. With that situation man deals artificially by 
having fires and clothes and houses for warmth, breezes 
and baths and awnings for coolness. Of the artificial 
temperature controllers, those for heating have been 
found much the more efficient. If the temperature is 
thirty degrees below that of our blood we find little 
difficulty keeping warm inside our houses and inside 
our clothes. But at thirty degrees above blood heat we 
find it difficult to keep cool. 

If our artificial heating devices are better than those 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 103 

for cooling, the same is even more true of our natural 
heating and cooling systems. The principles are the 
same. We keep a house warm or an engine going 
bj burning fuel; similarly we utilize food as fuel in 
our natural heat and power plants to keep our bodies 
warm. Our commercial refrigerating plants evaporate 
liquids for their purpose, and similarly we perspire to 
keep our bodies cool. 

A simple experiment will show the comparative 
efficiency of our heating and cooling systems. Take a 
square meal for your stomach's sake and a drink of 
water to supply your sweat glands. Wear no clothes 
and sit still in a room at 78° E. (20° below body 
heat) and you will be comfortable (if you are a normal 
healthy person) < Then raise the temperature to 118° F. 
(20° above body heat) and see how you like it. If 
you drop the temperature to 58° F. you may have to 
move about (thus speeding up your heating apparatus) 
to keep warm: if you raise the thermometer to 138° F. 
it will not be many hours till you begin to feel as if 
your life might be in danger. In animal experiments 
of this type it is generally found that if one set are 
exposed to heat which eventually causes death, other 
animals of the same sort exposed to a corresponding 
lowering of temperature suffer no permanent harm in 
the same period, both sets being supplied with food 
and with water to drink. 

These considerations throw further light upon the 
facts stated above — ^that tropical peoples get along with 
the arctic winter better than arctic people do with the 



104« THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

perpetual summer of the tropics. (The arctic summers, 
even on lowlands far from the sea, are unpleasantly 
hot for a few weeks only). 

In a workaday world our natural heating and cool- 
ing processes conflict seriously with each other. Activ- 
ity promotes oxidation, oxidation means heat, and the 
production of heat in the body means a cancellation of 
part of the efficiency of the cooling system. This is 
all very well in a cool climate, even advantageous, where 
the weather allows the sweat glands to take temporarily 
a complete rest. But in weather above 80° E. and es- 
pecially above 90° F. the production of internal heat 
is a serious matter, for the body will burn itself out 
if its internal temperature rises above 100° F. There- 
fore, no long continued strenuous activity can fail to 
injure the health of tropical peoples, except in very 
dry climates where the perspiration is quickly evapo- 
rated from the skin, giving efficient natural cooling. 
This explains, I think, why the high civilizations of the 
tropics have generally been connected with semi-arid or 
arid countries. But an arid country cannot produce 
much food except where irrigation is possible (or where 
floods take place, as in Egypt). The tropical lands that 
have the needed human energy seldom have the natural 
resources upon which that energy can be profitably ex- 
pended. The tropics are, therefore, at a fundamental 
disadvantage at any stage of the earth's history when 
there are people of more energizing climes to compete 
with them. 

We have here an explanation of the inevitable back- 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 105 

wardness of tlie humid tropics. Because of their vege- 
table and other riches we shall continue to seek them 
eagerly. But will it not he their destiny to be exploited 
by outsiders rather than to be developed by their own 
populations ? 

Many say the mind does not function properly in a 
warm, humid climate. Others insist, and with much 
to fortify their arguments, that some of our highest 
thinking has been done in the tropics. But then Egypt, 
Palestine, Arabia, Peru are semi-desert. In the humid 
tropics seers and saints may flourish — men of much 
thought and little action. With abnormal thyroid devel- 
opment the saint might even have the energy to become 
a prophet. But armies of disciples to translate the 
thought of the prophet into action are not likely to come 
out of the tropics unless from deserts like Arabia. 

There have been high civilizations in humid countries, 
such as Yucatan. But these civilizations are not 
known to have had the energy to withstand outside com- 
petition. They seem generally to have depended for 
their material achievements (such as the building of 
public works) upon slave or other forced labor. If they 
have not decayed from within they have been overthrown 
by more energetic people who came from the north of 
cool winters, from the mountains of cool nights or from 
the deserts where the body's cooling system works well. 

From my own experience I could tell many stories 
of the adaptability of southerners to the ISTorth, a thing 
that is well known also from the writings of other 
northern travelers. Peary tells us again and again in 



106 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

his books, and lie emphasized it to me personally, that 
the best traveling companion he ever had was Matt 
Henson, a typical American negro. ISTearly every 
whaling ship in arctic waters, whether on the Atlantic 
or the Pacific side, has carried in its crews one or 
more of one or another kind of southerner. These 
men have usually averaged as high as north Europeans 
in their ability to stand cold and in their enjoyment 
of the northern climate. 

But none of these stories is more striking than that 
of my old friend Jim Fiji whom I first met on the 
north coast of Canada in 1906 when he had already 
been there for many years. 

When the World's Fair was held in 1893, one of the 
exhibits was a young man who had grown to maturity 
in the Samoan Islands and had been brought to Chi- 
cago as a part of the exhibit of "native races." This 
young man was James Asasela. When the Fair was 
over, he drifted to San Francisco with an idea of get- 
ting back to the Samoas. He could not speak much 
English, so he went down to the waterfront to see if 
he could find a ship that looked as if it would take 
him home. He saw a small sailing ship that had sev- 
eral "Kanakas" aboard, natives of the Hawaiian Is- 
lands. He could not speak to these Hawaiians, but he 
knew what people and country they belonged to, so he 
went to the ofiicers of this ship and asked for a job, 
for he thought they were sailing for the Hawaiian 
Islands. Two or three months later he found himself 
in the Arctic. "Jim Fiji" from the tropics now had 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 107 

to spend the winter with a whaler at Herschel Island, 
two hundred miles north of the arctic circle, on the 
north coast of Canada. He found it hard, for he did 
not know how to take care of himself in the cold. He 
froze his face and his fingers and shivered and was 
miserable, and he has told me that he would have given 
anything to he out of it and home. But it was a three- 
years' voyage, and during the next two years he learned 
how to clothe himself properly and how to protect him- 
self from frost, and he liked the last year so well that 
when the vessel got down to San Francisco he im- 
mediately shipped on another whaler to go north 
again. And at the end of this three-year voyage he 
liked the North so well that when the ship turned 
home he asked permission of the captain to remain 
behind. 

Jim Fiji has lived in that country ever since, trap- 
ping and occasionally working for whalers or traders, 
and he worked three years for us on our expedition of 
1913-18. I have known him since 1906 as one of the 
finest men in the ISTorth, and consider him one of my 
good friends. He has been industrious and frugal, has 
caught many foxes, has sold his furs at favorable 
prices, and now he has money in the bank. The 
amount is a subject on which he is reticent, for he has 
in that respect the instincts of a miser. He will give 
you any food or clothing or other articles he has, but 
when anything has once been turned into money it 
never gets away from him. Some say he is worth ten 
thousand dollars and others say forty thousand. 



108 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

In 191Y his hair had turned nearly white and he 
was getting to be an old man. Although I am a great 
believer in the l^orth, it struck me one day that it 
might be no bad speculation for Jim Eiji to go back 
with some of his riches to the Samoan Islands and 
settle down. I suggested to him that a good thing to 
do would be to go south with us to San Francisco, put 
most of his money into Liberty Bonds, take a few thou- 
sand dollars to the Samoas and buy an estate on 
which he could live. This idea struck him very favor- 
ably and thereafter we had many talks about what he 
was going to do. He told me how you could get a man 
dov^i there to work for you all day for five cents, and 
he had great visions of what he was going to do with 
his plantation. Among other things, I was to come 
and visit him some time down there. He knew how 
fond I was of the Eskimo foods and he described in 
detail the peculiar Samoan foods which he was going 
to give me to see how I liked them. 

At the end of my 1913-18 expedition I came east to 
Ottawa and ISTew York and Jim Fiji went to San Fran- 
cisco. Some months later I went out to San Francisco 
and the day after I got there Jim Fiji called on me. 
I was surprised to find him still there, but he explained 
that when he got there he heard that one of his cousins 
was on the way from the Samoas and so he thought 
he would await his arrival before starting for home. 
When this cousin arrived he told him, among other 
things, that wages had gone up and that you no longer 
were able to hire a man for five cents per day. Various 



THE LIVABLE NORTH 109 

other things had changed for the worse, but the main 
thing that worried Jim was that he found he did not 
like the winterlessness of San Francisco and, as the 
Samoas were in that respect even worse, he had de- 
cided that he did not care to go back after all and his 
intentions now were to buy another trapping outfit and 
go back to the Arctic. 

This is what he has done. In the spring of 1919 
he was taken north by Captain Pedersen of the 
Herman, and Captain Pedersen tells me he landed 
Jim on Cape Bathurst, the second most northerly 
point on the Canadian mainland. He expects to live 
there the rest of his life. 

It seems to me impossible to deny that in such coun- 
tries as Missouri or Scotland winter is unpleasant, and 
that in such countries as northern Canada or Alaska 
summer is unpleasant. I have often argued with 
southerners who know only the unpleasant southern 
winter and have occasionally succeeded in making them 
understand that winter may be pleasant, though they 
have never found it so. I have often argued with 
Eskimos who know only the unpleasant northern sum- 
mer and have never succeeded in proving to them that 
any reasonable person could like Florida or Italy, for 
Eskimos are narrow-minded, lacking education and a 
liberalizing experience. I do expect to have better luck 
with the readers of this book in trying to prove to 
them that many reasonable persons like winter better 
than summer, for their minds have had more oppor- 



110 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

tunities for broadening. • But I don't expect much bet- 
ter luck. 

If stories without number and with the same moral 
as the foregoing still leave some unconvinced that jou 
can ever get any large numbers of southerners to be- 
come fond of winter and to colonize the Ear North, 
these are only the intellectual children and grand- 
children of those who said there never would be any- 
thing but a fur-traders' village where now stands the 
great city of Winnipeg. All we can do with such is to 
urge them to take good care of their health so they 
may live to see history once more repeating itself. 

Having gained from this experience the idea that 
a wise man may learn from the experience of others, 
though a fool learns only from his own, I have long 
ceased trying to explain to Eskimos that winter being 
essentially pleasanter than summer is only a matter 
of opinion, but I still keep urging on my more cultured 
and broader-minded southern friends (in connection 
with my ideas and plans of northern commercial de- 
velopment) general principles and specific evidence 
showing that a man or woman may be perfectly normal 
and still delight in a climate that is winter more than 
half the year. The general principles do not need to 
be reiterated. They are few and simple. But they 
need to be enforced by much testimony to show they 
really work. So I keep on telling story after story of 
the type of Judge Lomen's, Dr. iN'elson's, Cameron, 
the banker's, and Jim, the Samoan's. 



CHAPTER V 
THE ESTABLISHED ABCTIC INDUSTRIES 

Weitiistg a pioneer book, we concern ourselves little 
with matters that are commonly known or with snch 
detail of exposition as falls legitimately within the 
domain of chambers of commerce or the immigration 
departments of the countries concerned. The agricul- 
tural possibilities and the demonstrated agricultural 
achievements of the Mackenzie valley, the Yukon, 
Alaska or Siberia will receive the less space here be- 
cause they are continually getting wide publicity else- 
where. 

When I made my first journey down the Mackenzie in 
1906, I saw strawberries and other fruit being already 
successfully cultivated in the gardens of the Roman 
Catholic Mission at Fort Providence, 2,200 miles north 
of New York, 1,000 miles north of Winnipeg, and 500 
miles north of Edmonton, then the northern railway 
terminus. Erom the Mission at Fort Good Hope we 
purchased potatoes that had been raised about twenty 
miles south of the arctic circle. I have talked with 
traders who hold the northerly record of raising car- 
rots and cabbages in the Mackenzie delta, more than a 
hundred miles north of the arctic circle. Wheat and 
other cereals are grown at Fort Providence and Fort 

Simpson, and it may be said in general that the ordi- 

111 



112 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EIVfflRE 

narj cereals such, as rye and barley and most garden 
vegetables, tbough. probably not tomatoes, can be grown 
on the arctic circle in the Mackenzie valley and near 
Great Bear Lake. 

The Department of Agriculture at Washington and 
the Chamber of Commerce of Seattle will furnish de- 
tailed information with figures as to hay and wheat, 
garden produce and dairying, as far north in Alaska 
as one hundred miles south of the arctic circle and 
even to the circle itself. 

While it is true that most of the common garden 
vegetables can be cultivated almost anywhere in about 
half of Alaska, and while it is true that wheat and 
strawberries have been successfully cultivated north of 
Slave Lake on the Mackenzie River, and while similar 
success in arctic Europe and Asia has been even more 
notable, I still think it a mistake to pride ourselves on 
these endeavors. They are rather symptoms of one of 
0111? most serious economic ills. They are but another 
series of attempts to gather grapes from thorns and 
figs from thistles. 

Our chief domestic animals and nearly all of our 
food plants are tropical or subtropical in their origin. 
With regard to the plants this may be considered inevi- 
table, for in our present state of knowledge we are 
aware of no important plants, either growing wild or 
cultivated in a northern climate which can furnish any 
large amount of food for direct human consumption. 

Our remote ancestors who first domesticated animals 
lived in the south with tropical animals for neighbors. 




The Camp of the Oil Drillers keae Fort Xorman, just 
South of the Arctic Circle. 



'Ml. 


.> 






Til -f 


^M, 



A Subarctic Field of Graix — near Uawsox in the Yukon. 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 113 

These have retained under domestication their tropical 
or sub-tropical natures (in some cases even accentuated 
by coddling) and they are congenitally unable to fend 
for themselves in an arctic environment. It is "poor 
business" to try to raise ostriches in Minnesota or in 
Germany; it can be done but it would not pay. It 
is scarcely less unwise to try to raise cattle in Mon- 
tana and Alberta. It can be done and has paid under 
the economic conditions of say ten years ago. It is 
not paying very well now. My own family have tried 
for years to make a living by raising both wheat and 
cattle in middle Saskatchewan under difficulties which 
are inherent, not in the country, but in the system we 
have employed. ISTot until the world is much more 
crowded than it is to-day and not until food prices rise 
far above those which the farmer can secure at present, 
will it pay to shoulder the difficulties and hazard the 
risks of wheat and cattle cultivation in lands where 
wheat and cattle are not native. 

In a sense it is possible to gather grapes from thorns 
and figs from thistles, for the wheat and cattle farmers 
of the northern countries are doing it continually. It 
seems to me that one of the greatest industrial reforms 
of our time will come when the food producers of the 
world take to heart this Biblical text, cease their profit- 
less endeavors to force the hand of JSTature, and begin 
to adapt themselves to conditions Dy producing in each 
locality that food product which experiments shall show 
to be of those available the most nearly native. 

Generalizing, we may say that it is sensible to pro- 



114. THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

duce cattle in such climates as those of Texas and the 
Argentine. In climates like those of Manitoba or of 
Russia we should use the yak or the American bison or 
some animal developed by careful breeding upon the 
basis of hardy native stocks. Farther north, as this 
book specifically argues, it is insanity to try to raise 
cattle, it would be folly to try to raise bison or yak, 
and sensible only to cultivate the reindeer and ovibos 
and whatever other animals can be found or bred that 
are equally or better suited to the local conditions. 

If the farming and garden possibilities of the sub- 
arctic are already well known, other enterprises in 
those regions are better known. Once upon a time fur 
was considered the only thing of value to come out of 
the North. There is still fur, and the rise in prices 
has nearly kept step with the decrease in quantity, so 
that even now the fur output is to be reckoned with. 
Moreover, it has already been demonstrated that foxes 
and other animals can be raised with profit 
under conditions of semi-domestication, and "fur 
farming" is an established and promising industry.. 
In certain districts sealing and whaling have been car- 
ried on for centuries and are as well known as the fur 
trade. Gold mining through the various stampedes and 
through the agency of our novelists, is equally in the 
public mind when one thinks of the ISTorth. 

With regard to Alaska, it is of especial interest that 
among the many puzzled historians who have tried to 
decipher the riddle of Seward's purchase, there are 
several who think he did it to improve the credit of 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 115 

the United States bj showing the country was not 
broke. His method of showing it "was to hand out 
$7,200,000 in gold, and these historians say that the 
full value of that gold was presently received by the 
country through the improved credit abroad secured 
by this display of hard cash. Seward does not appear 
to have expected repayment from Alaska in kind, but 
the accepted estimate of the gold production there be- 
tween 1867 and 1920 is $319,665,000. Although gold 
is by no means the major source of Alaskan wealth, 
Seward's venture has already been repaid in gold alone 
forty-four times over. 

It is a commonplace now that in Alaska both copper 
and coal are sure to prove of more importance than 
the precious metals, and the same will probably apply 
to both iron and oil. The Canadian Yukon as well as 
Alaska has been productive of gold and there are few 
thoughtful people who will not readily agree that, 
square mile for square mile, arctic Canada promises as 
well in minerals as does Alaska. Oil has been struck in 
both countries but, so far as the arctic developments 
are concerned, the leading ones are in the Mackenzie 
basin, where there are actual flowing wells just a little 
south of the arctic circle with indication of oil for a 
thousand miles along the Mackenzie, both north and 
south of the present main prospect. 

We do not emphasize the fur and minerals of arctic 
and subarctic lands and the agriculture of the subarctic 
section, because doing so is no novelty, l^either shall 
we say much of the fisheries in spite of their gTeat 



116 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

money importance, for salmon and cod and herring 
no less than gold and fur have long been associated in 
the public mind with the northern countries. It is 
worth pointing out, however, that one of the impor- 
tant conclusions of oceanography is that the amount 
of animal life per cubic mile of ocean volume is prob- 
ably least at the equator and in a general way in- 
creases going away from the equator either north or 
south, until reaching such northern waters as those of 
Alaska and ISTorway and the northerly waters of 
Canada, where in salmon and herring and cod, in 
whale and seal and walrus, and in a great variety of 
other life forms, we have one of our chief resources 
against the time when, as many think, the whole world 
shall be short of food. Some of these foods are al- 
ready popular on our tables ; others will readily become 
so with use. Even should they never become favorites 
in the United States or Erance, they might still be of 
no less value to the world as a whole as the favorite 
foods of some other country. The Japanese now hunt 
whales for food. If they like to live on whale meat 
or on rice, it would be foolish for us to quarrel with 
their taste just because we do not agree with it, for it 
leaves that much more wheat and beef for the rest 
of us. 

Although well established in several countries, the 
reindeer industry is to most of us more novel than fur 
trading, whaling or gold mining, or almost any of 
the major northern industries. 

The origin of reindeer domestication is an unsolved 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 117 

problem, archseologically, ethnologically, and histori- 
cally; it is unsolved both as to time and place. The 
common belief is that the reindeer bones found with 
those of our European ancestors of the ice age are those 
of wild animals, though some have thought that they 
were even then domestic. Opinions differ here with 
regard to reindeer somewhat as they differ with regard 
to the horse which was one of the favorite foods of 
Europe from the remotest times down to the Middle 
Ages when the Church at length, through heretic 
burning and other devices, compelled our ancestors to 
curb their appetites for the flesh of animals that do not 
split the hoof. 

But though authorities vary as to the extreme an- 
tiquity of domesticated reindeer, there are none who 
dispute the Chinese historical records which show 
them to have been at least fairly common in northern 
China, or to the north of China, in the fifth century 
of our era. ISTeither is there any doubt of the his- 
torical validity of the reference to the domestic rein- 
deer of Norway made by King Alfred of England in 
the latter part of the ninth century. It does not neces- 
sarily follow, however, that the earlier historical proof 
for reindeer in China shows that they are any more 
ancient there than in Europe. Many have argued for 
an origin in some intermediate part of northern Asia. 

ISTot only are the local origin and antiquity of the 
reindeer industry unknown, but its present volume in 
Asia is little understood. Commodore Bertholf 
told me that when in 1901 he was sent by the United 



118 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

States Government to purchase on behalf of Alaska 
some hundreds of Tunguse deer, he went to Petrograd 
to secure official permission both for his own overland 
travel northeastward through Siberia and for the pur- 
chase of the reindeer. He was astounded to find that 
the officials with whom he dealt in Petrograd did not 
even know that there were domestic reindeer in north- 
eastern Siberia. This was a curious ignorance, for 
scholars both in Russia and in other lands had known 
of the industry for centuries; but it shows at any rate 
that no official statistics were then available. 

l^either do any statistics seem to be now available 
either for the industry of to-day or for its standing 
at, say, the beginning of the World War. We know 
in general that from the west coast of JSTorway to the 
east coast of Siberia on Bering Straits there stretches 
a (probably) unbroken chain of nomad herds. It has 
been reported from points thousands of miles apart in 
this vast area that single families considered only mod- 
erately well-to-do own five to twelve thousand reindeer. 
The reindeer of Siberia, then, are to be estimated by 
the million and ten million. 

It is only in the limited area adjoining ISTorway, 
Sweden and Finland that the meat of domestic rein- 
deer is a factor in commerce. In Helsingfors, Stock- 
holm, and Christiania, reindeer is a standard meat, 
sold by the hundred tons in the same markets with beef 
and mutton at prices ranging from equality with beef 
to twenty or twenty-five per cent, above (as, for in- 
stance, in Stockholm the winter 1918-19). In the 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 119 

north of Siberia, both in the interior and along the 
coast, export of meat is unknown and the export of 
skins so difficult that, practically speaking, the people 
live upon the reindeer herds direct. They eat the meat, 
dress in the skins, ride the animals in some places 
and drive them in others, and employ the milk in one 
district more, in another less and in some apparently 
not at all. In some places houses, tents and boats for 
river or ocean travel are also made of reindeer hides. 

In the past and even recently reindeer have been so 
common and cheap, for instance, near the shores of the 
Kara Sea, that among the chief articles of export have 
been the skins of grown animals, and particularly those 
of unborn and new-born calves which command a 
market in Europe as a fur for women's wear. In cer- 
tain districts and at certain times at least, great num- 
bers of reindeer have been butchered for the hides 
alone or the hides and tallow, allowing the flesh to go 
to waste. Although the daily papers tell us that thou- 
sands of people are dying in Russia from hunger, we 
can reliably infer from knowledge dating back only a 
few years, that the northerly parts of that country are 
now so abundantly supplied with food that were a 
trader to penetrate those regions, he could secure for 
a nominal price almost any number of reindeer hides 
from animals that would be butchered for the purpose, 
the flesh rotting or being eaten by dogs or wolves. 

The World War did something towards bringing 
western Europe to realize the accessibility of north- 
western Siberia by a sea route around the north tip 



120 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

of l^orwaj. Companies have already been formed to 
take up, as soon as economic conditions become stable, 
the erection of packing plants and the instalment of 
refrigerator steamers to bring this cheap, delicious, and 
already popular meat to London and Paris. The dif- 
ficulty of bringing the meat to the world markets in- 
creases, of course, as one goes east beyond the Kara 
Sea, but the recent journeys of Captain Sverdrup and 
others are convincing us rapidly that the handicaps are 
not serious. The route is not as long as that which 
brings Argentine beef to England, only half as long 
as that which brings Australian mutton; furthermore, 
the problems of refrigeration are much simpler in the 
northern than in the tropical oceans, an advantage 
which to a degree compensates for whatever difificulty 
there may be in meeting with occasional ice. 

Should the Japanese and Chinese or the people of 
Hawaii and San Francisco develop a taste for reindeer 
meat, the herds of northeastern Siberia are readily 
Available to ships plying to the north Pacific and the 
northeast arctic portions of Asia. 

A glance at any map of the Trans-Siberian Railway 
shows that the reindeer meat of the north Siberian 
prairies can be brought by river steamer up the great 
north-flowing rivers, either to the railways that have 
already been built or to the ends of spur lines that can 
be run north from the present trunk line to the head 
of navigation of such rivers as the Lena. It is not sug- 
gested that these spurs would be built for the single 
purpose of bringing reindeer meat south. That indus- 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 121 

try is merely one of many potentialities that make the 
railway development of Siberia as inevitable as was 
the railway development of the prairies of central 
l^orth America. 

Whether we estimate the domestic reindeer of north 
Siberia in tens or in hundreds of millions, we know, 
at any rate, that those vast prairies are capable of sup- 
porting a great many more than they do now. That 
growth will inevitably follow the coming development 
of a European market by ships plying from France 
and England around E^orway to the north coast of 
Siberia. But the industry awaits a new type of de- 
velopment in Canada and is already receiving it in 
[Alaska. 

Few if any white men have lived with the Eskimos 
on such terms of intimacy as I. Through ten years 
of residence, they have become as my own people, 
whose language I speak fluently if not quite correctly 
and whose thoughts and needs I understand, perhaps 
not correctly, but at least as correctly as they do them- 
selves. Most observers look upon the Eskimos from 
what the observers consider a superior point of view. 
They have ideas about their needs both spiritual and 
material which the Eskimos either never had or have 
only recently learned with difficulty from their pre- 
ceptors. 

When I first lived among the Eskimos of the Coro- 
nation Gulf district who had never seen a white man, 
I found them more nearly satisfied with their condi- 



122 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

tion than any people I have lived with of any social 
class in any part of the world. Their average of bodily 
health was at that time so high that when my im- 
mediate successor among them, Mr. Jenness, referred 
to them as people "without any serious ailments," I 
thought the expression no more of an over-statement 
than is justifiable for emphasis.^ Certainly I can im- 
agine no healthier people on the average. 

These uncontaminated Eskimos considered fat meat 
and lean meat ideal foods and they had plenty of both ; 
they considered fur clothes entirely satisfactory, and 
nearly every one had at least one complete new suit 
that had never been worn ; they were satisfied with the 
climate of the country and with its resources ; they had 
no desire to travel and no idea that any condition could 
be better than their own. When we came among them 
with firearms, steel butcher knives, and steel sewing 
needles, they envied greatly the needles which were 
vastly superior to their copper ones and envied only 
secondarily our butcher knives, which were indispu- 
tably better than their copper knives. The rifles they 
did not covet until we and traders who came a iew, 
months afterwards had been among them several 
months. 

But it is the common view of white men that even 
these Eskimos are badly off, though they do not know, 
it. There are some who consider the inability to 
appreciate their own wretchedness as one of the evils 

1 "The Copper Eskimos," by Diamond Jenness, The Geo- 
graphical Review, August, 1917, Vol. IV, No. 2. 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 123 

that most needs to be alleviated by our civilizers. In 
that effort we eventually succeed completely. An 
Eskimo may be considered to have emerged from bis 
savage state when be has become thoroughly dissatis- 
fied with his country and condition and has learned to 
complain to us in broken English about his inability 
to buy canned goods and ready-made shoddy clothing 
in the quantity he desires. 

Had I been in Alaska in the early '80's of last 
century, I should not have sympathized with the Rev- 
erend Sheldon Jackson, who saw the destitution of the 
Eskimos from the ordinary white man's philanthropic 
point of view and who conceived the idea of turning 
them from huntsmen into nomadic herdsmen to pro- 
vide food and clothing for themselves and their 
descendants. I should have given grudging assent, 
saying that if we would only leave the people alone 
they would be perfectly all right; but that the possi- 
bility of their being left alone being only an academic 
question, it was perhaps a good thing to intrdouce rein- 
deer. I should probably have been blind, as Sheldon 
Jackson himself seems to have been, to the fact that 
this enterprise, which he conceived as a philanthropy 
and carried through with philanthropic motives always 
as a driving force, was going to attain not only the 
ends which he had in view but also the totally different 
result of becoming one of the chief industries of 
Alaska. 

Sheldon Jackson has attained his object fully, for 
the reindeer are making the Eskimos economically in- 



124 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

dependent. More tlian that, the astounding success of 
the reindeer industry, which has been far beyond the 
predictions and hopes of its early advocates, is point- 
ing the way to the ultimate colonization of all the 
arctic prairies, both of Alaska and Canada, by ranch- 
men of the type of Texas and Montana and Alberta 
cattlemen of fifty and seventy-five years ago, the rein- 
deer taking the place of the Longhorn. 

It is commonly enough supposed by those partially 
familiar with the reindeer industry in Alaska that it 
started with breeding stock from jSTorway. This impres- 
sion arose from the fact that in 1897 Congress was stam- 
peded with stories of imminent starvation in the gold 
mining camps and was induced to appropriate money 
for rescue purposes. A considerable part of this money 
was used to purchase something like five hundred ]^or- 
wegian reindeer steers, which were brought with a loss 
of less than one per cent, from Norway to 'New York 
and thence to Seattle and the south coast of Alaska. 
But when the attempt was made to drive the animals 
into the interior, it turned out, as any thoughtful per- 
son could foresee, that they were unable to find food 
in the forest, exactly as cattle would have been and 
for the same reason. The meadow and prairie and 
not the deep wood is always the logical habitat of 
grazing animals. Many of the reindeer starved to 
death ; few if any were of value in preventing the star- 
vation of any miner, and, as said, the whole enterprise 
had no bearing on the establishment of any industry 
in Alaska. 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 125 

Through the efforts of Sheldon Jackson, the Ameri- 
can Government imported from Siberia 171 reindeer 
into Alaska in 1892. Between that period and 1902 
a total of 1,280 Siberian reindeer were imported. 
From this small beginning have developed a hundred 
or more herds scattered over northern and western 
Alaska that are now estimated to have a total of over 
200,000 animals although a 100,000 or more have been 
butchered for meat and skins. 

Seventy-five years ago you could buy a steer in Texas 
for seventy-five cents, and in a sense it paid to raise 
them at that price. To speak of cattle-raising in Texas 
at that time was almost a contradiction in terms, for 
the animals took care of themselves. The climate and 
country were such that no barns were needed for 
shelter, no hay for feed, and half a dozen men could 
look after a great many thousand head. The work was 
little beyond branding and rounding-up when the time 
came to sell. Similar conditions obtain in Alaska 
now. The reindeer are as well adapted to the north 
coast of Alaska as cattle ever were to the most favored 
part of Texas, and if we place the cost of raising rein- 
deer in Alaska to-day at two dollars per head rather 
than seventy-five cents, it is not because the labor re- 
quired in raising them now is proportionally greater 
than with Texas cattle seventy-five years ago, but 
merely because wages and all other things have gone 
up. The reindeer needs no barn to shelter it, no hay 
to feed it, and little care beyond branding and pro- 
tection from wolves. How simple the wolf problem 



126 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

is may be seen from the statement to me of Mr. Charles 
W. Hawkesworth, who on behalf of the United States 
Government superintended about 20,000 reindeer for 
five years in northwestern Alaska with a loss by wolf- 
killing, so far as he knew, of three animals. 

The experience of Lomen and Company, who are 
at present the largest private owners in Alaska, is that 
it is advisable to keep reindeer in "standard" herds 
of about 10,000 head. Each herd is satisfactorily 
looked after by half a dozen or so Eskimos. That 
a white manager is employed for each herd is partly 
because the Eskimos, although by nature reliable, have 
not as yet really evolved from the hunting into the 
pastoral stage. It is difficult for them to take seriously 
the continuous care of property although they do the 
work efficiently under even a casual superintendence. 

As mentioned elsewhere in this book, there is no 
problem nor the semblance of a mystery connected with 
the adaptability of reindeer to an arctic climate. They 
are an arctic animal just as the fish is a sea animal 
and the crocodile a swamp animal, and one mystery is 
no greater than the others. We have pointed out else- 
where that the summer is adequately long and hot for 
the growth of a rich vegetation; the winter cold, as 
such, is not known ever to have interfered with the 
happiness of reindeer ; the snowfall in northern Alaska 
is much lighter than in such well-known cattle coun- 
tries as Montana, where cattle forage all winter. Eur- 
thermore, were the snowfall five times or even ten 
times as heavy as it really is, this would of itself be 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 127 

no problem either to the reindeer or to their owners. 

The only condition under which snow could be dan- 
gerous to reindeer is that actually found in certain 
parts of northern Norway where there are narrow 
grassy valleys separated by barren rocky ridges, and 
where there is a heavy snowfall with an occasional 
strong wind. Under such conditions the snow may be 
swept off the ridges into the deep grassy hollows, ac- 
cumulating there to a depth of five and ten or twenty 
feet. Through five feet of snow reindeer will dig their 
way but not through ten or twenty feet. Because of 
a topographic peculiarity, northern IsTorway is, there- 
fore, especially ill-adapted to reindeer. That it is, 
nevertheless, a great reindeer country indicates that 
the industry must flourish well in northern Siberia, 
northern Canada and northern Alaska, all of them better 
grazing countries than JSTorway because they are pre- 
vailingly vast prairies without the deep narrow valleys 
where excessive snow can accumulate. 

There is only one climatic condition that is seri- 
ously detrimental to reindeer. This is what is known 
as a folin in ISTorway and as a cliinooh in the Rocky 
Mountain district of Western Canada — a winter thaw. 
This may produce a coating of ice over hundreds and 
even thousands of square miles of grassland, making 
it difficult or impossible for grazing animals to feed. 
In northern iN'orway this occurs rather frequently, 
causing difficulty and loss. In northern Canada and 
northern Alaska it is nearly unknovra. In western and 
southwestern Alaska and in Labrador and other parts 



128 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

of eastern Canada, it may occur althougli apparently 
not witli the frequency and severity common in I^Torway. 

Fortunately, there is usually in winter a marked 
dijfference in temperature hetween the immediate coast 
and the country inland and also between the lowlands 
and the highlands. There are few places, therefore, 
where herds cannot be driven out of the ice-covered 
area by heading them inland or towards mountains. 
Again, should there be a heavy ice coating in the in- 
terior or up in the mountains, it will be found that 
on the lowland and down near the coast the thaw has 
been so great that all snow has disappeared and most 
of the water has run off without forming ice. The 
chinook is, therefore, a menace that can be met suc- 
cessfully by quick and intelligent action on the part of 
those who control the herds. 

The same mobility which makes it easy to drive 
reindeer away from an ice-covered area is an impor- 
tant quality they have in relation to the marketing 
problem. In the old days Texas cattle used to be driven 
five and six hundred miles to market at St. Louis and 
Kansas City. Driving reindeer equally far would be 
easier, for they are the most mobile of domestic ani- 
mals, even more so than horses. In an actual trial 
several hundred reindeer steers in Alaska were driven 
in mid-winter 1920 five hundred miles at an average 
rate of ten miles per day, and arrived at their destina- 
tion almost as fat as when they started and with ample 
fat for immediate butchering. Cattle driven the same 
distance, even through good grazing territory at the 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 129 

most favorable time of year, could not equal this record, 
and tlie reindeer were driven at the least favorable 
time of year. 

In beginning the colonization of any country the 
ocean and the rivers furnish highways and give loca- 
tion to trading centers. Alaska is one-fifth the size 
of the United States, but there is no point in it five 
hundred miles from either the coast or the Yukon 
River. In some places drives could not be made be- 
cause of intervening forests, but wherever grasslands 
are there is usually found a continuation of them down 
to the coast in some direction. 

Railways will doubtless eventually play their part 
in the development of Alaska but, from the point of 
view of the reindeer industry, they will be for a long 
time a convenience rather than a necessity. 

Two things led me to undertake in Canada (in 1919) 
a campaign for the introduction of domestic reindeer 
— ^the success of the enterprise in Alaska and my 
realization that the climate of all northern Canada is 
not only substantially the same as that of Alaska where 
the reindeer are developing so bounteously, but also 
about the same as that of Manitoba where great cities 
and widespread rural communities now flourish. After 
spending more than twenty years in the climate of 
ITorth Dakota and Manitoba and more than ten in the 
polar regions, I knew that you cannot like the one and 
dislike the other. The whole problem of colonizing 
northern Canada resolves itself, then, into finding a 
means of livelihood for people of the type that are 



130 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

now wiUing to live in Manitoba and Dakota. There are 
mines, there is oil, there are many other resources in 
the Far Korth. But local food production is funda- 
mental in every permanently occupied land; it fur- 
nishes a basis for a stable population, it makes easy 
the development of industries which, although based 
on minerals, cannot well flourish when all the food 
needed has to be brought from a great distance. The 
development of food production in the ITorth is, there- 
fore, the logical first step in the development of its 
mines and oil fields. 

In 1919 I laid formally before the Canadian Gov- 
ernment, and especially before the Honorable Arthur 
Meighen, then Minister of the Interior, my ideas with 
regard to the colonization of the northern mainland of 
Canada and the islands to the north of Canada. These 
plans were based mainly on the introduction of do- 
mestic reindeer and the domestication of the ovibos. 
As pointed out in a previous chapter, there resulted 
the appointment through an order-in-council of a Royal 
Commission to investigate the resources of northern 
Canada. In their voluminous and excellent report 
there is at least one gap. I tried to get the Commission 
to ask each of the witnesses how he personally liked the 
climate of the ISTorth and whether he believed that the 
climate through its mere disagreeableness would be a 
serious deterrent to colonization. The Chairman of the 
Commission, however, ruled that it was not within our 
province to investigate the allurements of the North 
as a winter resort. 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 131 

My original idea was that the development of the 
reindeer industry in the Canadian North should be 
undertaken as a government enterprise. I said to Mr. 
Meighen that it was a project comparable in its po- 
litical and commercial significance to the construction 
of the Panama Canal and should be carried out rapidly 
with the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars. 
His feeling and that of his colleagues was that beyond 
whatever doubts there might be of the feasibility of 
the undertaking, there was also grave doubt whether 
a government should "encroach upon the legitimate 
domain of private enterprise." Furthermore, the peo- 
ple were taxridden and were already clamoring for 
economy. It was decided, therefore, that rather than 
ask Parliament for vast sums of money they would 
give me a long lease of a large tract of arctic land and 
have me seek out some capitalist sufficiently broad- 
minded and far-sighted to undertake for the public 
good as well as his own an enterprise which could not 
be expected to yield dividends for fifteen or twenty 
years. 

I soon learned that capitalists willing to look twenty 
years ahead for their dividends are not easy to find. 
After a year of unsuccessful effort, first in Canada and 
then in the United States, I finally went to England 
and to the Hudson's Bay Company. Their Board of 
Governors said at once that they were willing to under- 
take the enterprise and for two reasons : They believed 
in its ultimate business success, and they had for some 
time been looking around for a constructive enterprise 



132 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

of magnitude which they might develop in Canada. 
iFor two hundred and fifty years in their dealings with 
the arctic and subarctic lands they had been engaged 
almost entirely in trading with the natives for furs. 
This is a non-productive enterprise in the sense that 
they were merely taking out of the country its in- 
digenous natural wealth. In that sense fur trapping 
resembles mining as a plundering of JSTature's store- 
house and is the antithesis of the reindeer industry, 
in that the reindeer have to be imported into Canada 
and kept there for years and decades before any profit 
can be made from their increase. 

It is worth saying parenthetically that, while the 
land lease given us by the Canadian Government is the 
largest in modem times, it is hedged about with nearly 
every conceivable restriction. One is that not a single 
share in the new reindeer company must ever be put 
on the market and every penny spent must come di- 
rectly out of the funds of the old Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany. Of course, shares in the old Company can be 
purchased but shares in its subsidiary, the Hudson's 
Bay Reindeer Company, are not for sale. If any were 
sold, proof of that fact would constitute a valid reason 
for the cancelation of the Company's charter by the 
Government. 

The Hudson's Bay Reindeer Company with head 
offices in Winnipeg, has a lease of about 113,000 square 
miles, which is the southern half of Baffin Island. 
This is about one and one-third times the area of Eng- 
land and Scotland and "Wales or about two and one- 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 133 

half times the area of 'New York State, and the lease 
is for fifty years. The breeding stock will be pur- 
chased in 'NoTwaj. The first consignment of 550 head 
was landed in October, 1921. It is the plan that if 
these animals do well, similar shipments from Norway 
will follow year by year. ISTaturally, the Company 
plans to land several thousand animals eventually, be- 
cause otherwise they would not be making suitable use 
of the land allotted them; indeed, the charter has a 
provision for cancelation if the rate of increase of the 
animals proves to be substantially less than that laid 
down in the Company's prospectus. 

It is certain that long before the success of the enter- 
prise in Baffin Island is actually demonstrated, the 
more striking demonstration of Alaskan success will 
induce many companies and private individuals to 
enter into reindeer breeding in Canada. However, the 
difficulties there will, in some parts at least, be a little 
more serious than in Alaska for two reasons: wolves 
are more numerous, and wild caribou are more 
numerous. 

The greatest danger will be from the unbelievably 
large herds of caribou. It is said by some authorities 
that you can incorporate into your reindeer herds about 
ten per cent, of their number per year of caribou. 
This will be to the advantage of the domestic herds in 
increasing the size of the animals, for the caribou are 
larger. Every caribou incorporated will mean also that 
much clear numerical gain. It is generally agreed, 
however, that if a large number of wild animals, 



134 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

say twenty to fifty per cent., were to get into a 
herd it would become unmanageable. It follows for 
an added reason that a herd of a few thousand domestic 
animals that comes in contact with a herd of many 
thousand wild animals will be lost. 

If you want to know what the great caribou herds 
are like, read "Thompson's ISTarrative of His Explora- 
tions in Western America — 1Y84-1812," by David 
Thompson (pp. 100-101) ; "Across the Sub- Arctic of 
Canada," by J. W. Tyrrell (p. 77), or my own account 
in "My Life with the Eskimo" (pp. 224-226). David 
Thompson estimates a single herd at three and a half 
million; Tyrrell says the numbers could only be reck- 
oned in acres or square miles, and I have said the num- 
bers are beyond comprehension. A reindeer herd of 
almost any size that happens to be in the way of such 
a caribou migration would be swallowed up without 
leaving a trace. 



There are some who say that this is not the time to 
consider the development of new meat-producing areas, 
for beef and mutton are down in price. Such a view 
does not go beyond the next ten or twenty years. Its 
advocates are men who consider that nothing is worth 
doing unless it promises dividends "within a reasonable 
time." 

Those who know the inexorable forward march of 
the population of the world and whose minds are of 
the type of him who plants an oak to shade a coming 



ESTABLISHED ARCTIC INDUSTRIES 135 

generation, are the ones to whom must be addressed 
the arguments for the development of the ISTorth. The 
experience of a year of continuous activity showed me 
that I could not find in the United States or Canada 
any business man who would invest millions in the 
Canadian reindeer industry, even after he was con- 
vinced that twenty years from now he would receive 
large dividends, and I had to go to the oldest commercial 
company of the Old World before I found men of suf- 
ficiently long vision. If most capitalists can not look 
twenty years ahead for their profits, neither, it seems 
to me, need the average farmer worry because the supply 
of reindeer meat from the North twenty years from 
now will hold down the price of his southern beef ani- 
mals. The prices of beef undoubtedly will be higher 
twenty years hence than they are now though reindeer 
meat may prevent them from soaring as they otherwise 
would. Anyway, we hope that the same people who 
cannot visualize dividends two decades ahead will not 
worry about a drop in prices that is equally distant. 

According to the accepted vital statistics, the world 
population of the year 1800 was not doubled until about 
1915 or 1920. With a lessened infant mortality, with 
greater longevity, with presumably fewer famines and 
epidemics, the population of the world should double 
again within the next hundred years. By that time 
the average world population will be as dense as it 
now is in Belgium. It is against that time we must 
plan in developing and conserving our food and our 
fuel resources. 



136 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

There are some wLio saj that long before the year 
2000 we shall have released the energy of the atom and 
shall stop using petroleum, and that long before then 
we shall learn to make food directly out of the air thus 
doing away with pig-stys and wheat fields. That may 
prove so, but it is well to have two strings to our bow 
and to plan to conserve fuel and produce food so that 
we shall have something to fall back on in case the 
dreams of our chemists are not realized fast enough to 
keep step with the increase of population.^ 



CHAPTEE VI 
THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 

Every domestic beast and bird is a heritage from 
our prehistoric ancestors. !N^ot only that, but written 
history shows no intelligent and persistent effort to 
domesticate a new animal. Even the ones that came 
into European civilization as recently as did tobacco 
and the potato were borrowed by us from the aborigines 
of America or some other "savage" land. The turkey 
which is still found wild in some parts of North 
America is only a cousin of the domestic turkey which 
we inherited, ready-domesticated, from the Mexicans. 

In another book I have made a study of the food 
prejudices of men and dogs, showing that boys brought 
up in a primitive way and used to living year after 
year on half a dozen articles of food, are commonly 
difficult to induce to eat a new food unless it has been 
skilfully advertised to them in advance as specially 
delicious or particularly popular among some class to 
whom they look up, as, for instance, the rich in our 
cities. On the other hand, boys brought up in cosmo- 
politan surroundings who either travel much while they 
are young and thus become familiar with many foods 
or who live in homes or hotels where domestic and 
imported foods are available in large variety, take 

readily to new foods. 

137 



138 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

This is another application of the principle well 
known to all keepers of hotels or boarding schools, that 
the boarders who come from the poorest homes com- 
plain most about the food. That this is not primarily 
because thej are "trying to show off" and pretend they 
are used to the best, has been shown by strictly analogous 
experiments with animals which cannot be supposed 
to have a desire for ostentation, at least in this sense. 
It has been brought out that dogs reared among the 
northern Indian^ or Eskimos, which live their entire 
lives on only two or three articles of food, such as rab- 
bits, caribou, and fish, will at first refuse to eat any 
new food, such as mutton, wild goose, or seal; while 
dogs brought up in a southern household or on a whal- 
ing ship and used to all sorts of flavors through forag- 
ing in garbage pails or receiving the remnants of the 
family's dinner will take readily to these or almost 
any other new foods. If you have an Eskimo dog that 
never has eaten anything but seal and fish, and a white 
man's dog that has in its lifetime eaten a hundred 
different foods, it would be at least a ten to one bet 
that were both offered a new kind of meat, such as 
bison or hippopotamus, the civilized dog would fill his 
belly with it promptly while the Eskimo dog would 
refuse. 

Another application of this general principle is 
found in our civilized dietary. We have hundreds of 
varieties of fruits, vegetables and cereals but only a 
dozen or so varieties of meat. The result is that we 
seek eagerly for additions to the variety of our vege- 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 139 

table foods while new meats are difficult to introduce. 

It happens, fortunately, that the two most important 
new meats about to appear on our tables are easy to 
introduce; one because the name reindeer suggests 
venison, which is already popular, and the other be- 
cause the meat of musk oxen, if only the name can be 
changed into something more attractive, can be dif- 
ferentiated from domestic beef through texture, color 
or odor only by experts and then only if cooked in the 
simplest ways, as, for instance, a roast or a broiled 
chop. Bringing the reindeer to our tables is an ac- 
complished fact with which we have dealt in another 
chapter. ISTone but epicures are likely to taste musk 
ox during the next ten or fifteen years although its 
domestication is about to be taken in hand. 

Although musk was a delicate and expensive per- 
fume as recently as the time of our grandmothers, the 
fashion has so changed since then that the odor is now 
known by name only and the impression has begun to 
spread that it is a stink rather than a perfume. This 
impression, however, is not shared by those who have 
among their family heirlooms the beautiful silver per- 
fume cases of our ancestors. Our first problem in 
domesticating the musk ox is, accordingly, choosing 
for the beast a new name. 

Musk melon has become popular as cantaloupe and 
we expect musk ox beef to become a staple under some 
name derived from ovihos. That name may not be a 
happy choice and has been settled on only because this 
is the scientific term which has already been in use 



140 fTHE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

for generations and furnishes us something to start 
with in the campaign of popularization. 

ISTow that we have introduced the animal under its 
old name, we shall continue the discussion of it under 
the new. 

Without being accurately descriptive, the Latin 
"ovibos," or "sheep-cow," does give some idea of the 
general appearance and other characteristics of this 
candidate for the first large-scale effort of civilized man 
to enrich the world with a new domestic animal. Es- 
sentially we have a cow with a coat of wool. Our 
main concern with them is as cattle, for the world 
stands in even more need of food than of clothing, but 
the wool will be a valuable by-product. 

My idea of ovibos as a domestic animal was devel- 
oped through intimate association. With a party of 
sixteen people and about fifty dogs we were spending 
a year in Melville Island, living entirely by hunting. 
We killed a few polar bears, a few seals and a few 
caribou, but in the main we lived on ovibos. Seven 
hundred miles north of the arctic circle we dwelt in 
houses made of their hides, used the tallow for candle- 
light, and the meat and fat for ninety per cent, of our 
food, the other ten per cent, being the flesh of the other 
animals mentioned. We estimated that in the island 
there were about four thousand ovibos, roughly four 
hundred of which we had to kill to support our party 
through the year. This left numerous herds still 
peacefully grazing about our camps. We saw them at 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 141 

a distance nearly every day and came in close contact 
with them frequently. 

I think it was in January, 1916, that my ideas of 
how the ovibos could be domesticated and made an im- 
portant item of the world's food supply had taken clear 
enough form to be presented to a few people who, I 
hoped, would become sponsors of the movement. I had 
with me a typewriter and some carbon paper, so I 
wrote a letter in quadruplicate, addressing it to 
Colonel Roosevelt but sending carbons to three other 
men. Sir Robert Borden, then Prime Minister of 
Canada, Sir Richard McBride, then High Commis- 
sioner for Canada in London, and to Sir Edmund 
Walker, the President of the Canadian Bank of Com- 
merce at Toronto. The letter was addressed to Roose- 
velt because above all others he had the imagination 
and the pioneer type of mind for this sort of enter- 
prise. Duplicates were sent to Canadians rather than 
Americans or Europeans because it is in Canada (next 
to Siberia, with the government of which I did not 
know how to get in touch) that ovibos is destined to 
have its greatest future as a domestic animal. Another 
reason why Canadians are most intimately concerned 
is that, apart from a few in Greenland, the only sur- 
vivors of the formerly widespread ovibos species are 
now found in Canadian territories. 

Rather than quote my lengthy letter to Colonel 
Roosevelt, I shall summarize it here. I use a sum- 
mary of the letter rather than a new statement as I 



142 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

want the opportunity of presenting Roosevelt's reply 
because of the pertinence of his comment and the weight 
of his endorsement. 

The size of ovibos is about that of Highland cattle 
although the proportions of the body are different. A 
bull, if especially big and especially fat, will weigh 
over seven hundred pounds, of which perhaps one hun- 
dred pounds would be fat. The percentage of waste 
in butchering is somewhat higher than that with do- 
mestic cattle because of the massive head and big 
horns, the especially large paunch and the generally 
heavy character of the skeleton. Ovibos is, therefore, 
several times as large as the domestic sheep. When 
we remember what animal husbandry has done to in- 
crease the weight of cattle within our time, it will be 
seen that under domestication the size can be further 
increased by a few generations of careful breeding. 

In a newspaper interview given out at the time 
when my proposal to domesticate the ovibos first at- 
tracted newspaper notice, Admiral Peary said that 
their flesh is better eating than our domestic beef — 
equal in tenderness, similar in color, and superior in 
flavor. As to the flavor, I could never agree with the 
Admiral, for at least a dozen of my American and 
European companions had given it as their verdict 
that the meat is indistinguishable from domestic beef 
through flavor or odor. However, the meat might 
differ a little from beef and still be a good meat in 
the opinion of those who prefer beef to all other meats. 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 143 

Guinea-fowl does not necessarily have to be exactly 
like chicken to be a good meat any more than turkey 
has to be exactly like the ordinary European goose to 
be at least equally popular. 

How ovibos got the name or idea of musk associated 
with it is, so far as I know, an insoluble historical 
mystery. Should any reader of this chapter know the 
answer, I should be delighted to embody it in a future 
edition, if there is one. Two possible explanations have 
occurred to me. 

In the time of early American exploration the mo- 
tives of its patrons were frequently commercial. At 
that time spices and perfumes were more important 
in commerce than they are to-day and many adven- 
turers fared forth in search of either or both. A prized 
perfume of that time was musk, derived principally 
from the musk deer of Asia. Conceivably, some navi- 
gator returning to Europe reported to his patron that 
while he had failed to find a short route to the Indies 
or to discover precious stones or gold by the bucketful, 
he had seen great herds of musk deer from which per- 
fume in large quantities could be secured. It is even 
possible, though difiicult to understand, that some of the 
early navigators may really have been ignorant enough 
to mistake ovibos for musk deer. One might almost 
as readily confuse turkeys with doves. 

It is well known that every animal has its own pe- 
culiar odor. In the case of some (notably the skunk) 
the odor is frequently very strong when associated 
with the living animal and entirely absent from meat 



144 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

that has been properly butchered. At certain seasons 
there is a pungent odor about the elderly ovibos but it 
is not as strong as in the case of the domestic sheep 
or the wild caribou. If one is sufficiently endowed 
with imagination and especially if one is little enough 
acquainted with real musk, one may speak of this as 
a musk odor. 

To give the statement the additional weight of cor- 
roboration by several observers, I quote Sverdrup, who 
sums up as follows the experience of himself and a 
ship's company of Europeans through four years of 
intimate contact with ovibos in Ellesmere Island : ^ 
"Having shot many of these animals and drunk the 
milk of the cows, without ever detecting the flavour of 
musk from which they are supposed to derive their 
name, I have decided to call them in this book polar 
oxen." 

If there is any musk odor about ovibos it pertains 
to the living beast and possibly to certain parts of a 
dead one and not to the meat as it would appear on 
the market. If there were the odor of musk, it should 
not be considered unpleasant, for in the opinion of 
many it is a delicate perfume. Our ancestors who 
knew the perfume intimately would have been as likely 
to object to the fragrance of violets as to that of musk. 
All of which is academic discussion for, as said, the 
odor of ovibos beef is but that of our domestic beef. 

In color and flavor the fat of the ovibos is in gen- 

i^'New Land," by Otto Sverdrup, London, 1904. See footnote 
to p. 35, Vol. I. 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 145 

eral similar to that of beef though not identical as is 
the case with the lean. All of mj companions said 
that they preferred the ovibos fat to beef fat and they 
further agreed that there is more range of variety in 
flavors as between fats from different parts of the body. 
The largest accumulation is on the neck and this is 
especially delicious. 

!N^o wild animal gives a large amount of milk. Do- 
mestic cattle when allowed to run wild on the range 
give only from three to five pints of milk where the 
same cow would give four times that much under 
dairying conditions. It is not surprising, therefore, 
that ovibos gives little milk. They give a good deal 
more than reindeer, however, and reindeer are used 
as milk animals in various parts of the world and also 
for butter and cheese-making. My men agreed that 
in flavor the milk of ovibos seemed to be about like 
that of the Jersey cow, but naturally we had to rely 
on our memories of Jersey milk in making that com- 
parison. In richness it excels the Jersey, for the 
"whole milk" is of about the consistency of the 
cream ordinarily for sale in our cities. Probably the 
percentage of fat in the undiluted ovibos milk is not 
as high as in our city cream, but the consistency of 
the milk gives a creamlike impression. It is doubtful 
whether it will ever be found desirable to develop the 
milk qualities of ovibos but should that occasion arise, 
the end can be attained up to a certain limit. 

Any one who has herded cattle knows they have an 
adventurous disposition which is annoying to their 



146 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

caretakers. They tend to rove in search of pasture 
and that quality is shared by most grass-eating domes- 
tic animals. Here the ovibos differ fundamentally. 
They fill their paunches with the vegetation nearest 
to them and when satiated they lie down. After two 
or three hours of rest they get up again, commence 
feeding in the immediate vicinity and lie down a sec- 
ond time when their paunches are filled. Melville 
Island is in the main rocky compared with other arctic 
lands known to me, and is especially infertile. Even 
so, the ovibos under our observation did not move on 
the average more than two or three miles a month. 
In their march they cropped the grass down fairly 
close and browsed on the low willows, moving mainly 
in one direction until they came to a rocky ridge de- 
void of vegetation. They would then march over the 
ridge until they came to the nearest meadow. This 
might be a few hundred yards or even a mile or two. 
"Whenever they found a grassy spot they stopped and 
resumed their systematic slow progress at the rate of 
a few rods per day. David Hanbury and others have 
quoted the northern Indian as saying that ovibos move 
so slowly that if you find them here one year you will 
find them here the next. This is overstating the case 
but it emphasizes the point we are making and which 
all observers have made: These animals are as little 
mobile as any grazing animal can be. 

There are three main systems of controlling graz- 
ing animals under domestication — fencing, herding, 
and the round-up system. Fencing is suitable for any 



> 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 147 

of them and is to be used wlien it is less expensive or 
more convenient than herding. The round-up system 
has been used with even the most mobile animals, such 
as horses and cattle. It is far better suited to ovibos, 
for where horses and cattle might wander two hundred 
miles in half a year, ovibos would probably not move 
more than twenty. With the mobile reindeer, herd- 
ing is now practised and perhaps it always will be. 
But with ovibos I am inclined to think the round-up 
system may prove cheaper and more convenient. 

Most grazing animals have many natural enemies 
but, so far as I know, ovibos has only one — man. In 
ancient times when they ranged far south, the panthers 
or other large varieties of the cat family may possibly 
have preyed upon them. In Alaska brown bears are 
known to kill reindeer occasionally and it seems not 
impossible that they may in remote times have killed 
ovibos. I cannot say that polar bears never kill them 
but must confine myself to the statement that my per- 
sonal experience and my inquiries from Eskimos have 
both failed to reveal a single instance of their being 
killed or even attacked or pursued by polar bears. On. 
the mainland of ISTorth America their range and that 
of the barren ground grizzly overlap but here also my 
inquiries have been negative, failing to show any kill- 
ing of the one animal by the other. The possibility 
must, however, be acknowledged. 

With many northern travelers a theory strongly 
held has often led to definite statements that seem en- 
tirely reasonable and are borne out by the general high 



148 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

character of the men who made them. Some of these 
statements have, nevertheless^ no real foundation. 
Who vs^ould doubt the general truthfulness of Sir Ed- 
ward Parry? It is clearly shown in all his narratives. 
Even so, it does not occur to us to believe what he 
states for a positive fact — that all the ovibos leave 
Melville Island in the fall, migrating south and re- 
turning to that island in the spring. It is a common- 
place of our knowledge now that no such migration 
occurs. 

Basing their statements similarly on what seemed 
to them reasonable, many northern travelers have said 
that wolves prey upon ovibos. In this connection it is 
not commonly noted that there are only two groups of 
northern explorers who have ever been in really in- 
timate continuous contact with the ovibos — the four- 
year Norwegian expedition of Otto Sverdrup, 1898- 
1902, and the five-year Canadian Arctic Expedition 
under my command, 1913-18. In his extensive resi- 
dence in the ISTorth, Admiral Peary commonly used 
Eskimo hunters and, although a large amount of ovibos 
beef was eaten by his expeditions, nearly all the con- 
tact with the living animals was either by Eskimos or 
by sailors sent out by Peary to kill herds and bring 
home the meat. MacMillan's expedition was in the 
same general situation. Both Peary and MacMillan 
were themselves occasionally present at the killing of 
ovibos and killed some themselves, but they never had 
the herds before their eyes continually month after 
month as we did, for instance, in Melville Island. 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 149 

Instead of describing our experience I shall, however; 
merely cite and endorse Sverdrnp's statement : ^ 

"On arriving at the camp we had noticed two polar herds 
up a Httle valley. They appeared to consist of foui' cows, 
each with a calf. The seven unwounded wolves, having to 
leave us with stomachs as empty as when they came, now went 
inland, taking a line northwards towards the plains, and came 
across these animals. The meeting was evidently quite unex- 
pected on both sides, for the air was so still that they could 
hardly have got wind of each other, and we could see that the 
wolves actually started when they caught sight of the oxen. 
lIThey stopped short, and stood still a while, probably making 
out their plan of attack. Finally they formed a ring round 
the nearer of the animals, but not one of them would approach 
closer than two or three hundred yards. There they took up 
their stand, and as long as we were about — and that was for 
several hours — they kept at their music without let or hin- 
drance. Such music, too! A long-drawn weird howling, as if 
a knife were being driven into them every time they uttered 
the sound. 

"We were most curious to see what would happen. We 
thought that the four cows with their small calves must be a 
splendid opportunity for the wolves, but the cows did not seem 
to be at all impressed by them; and, as a matter of fact, were 
so indifferent that they did not even take the trouble to get 
up. When later on the wolves appeared to think of approach- 
ing the other herd, which was somewhat scattered, the animals 
drew nearer together, but did not form a square. It would 
appear from this scene that the polar ox stands in no great 
awe of the wolf." 

It seems entirely reasonable to suppose that now and 
then a new-born calf may go to sleep in the tall grass 

2 "New Land," by Otto Sverdrup, London, 1904, Vol. II, p. 390. 



150 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

and be temporarily forgotten by its mother. At sucli 
a moment a wolf could doubtless dash in and kill the 
calf before the mother could interfere. I have inquired 
from Eskimos whether they ever knew this to occur 
and my observation agrees with their statement that, 
while this seems a reasonable possibility, it has not been 
observed to happen. It is further said, and I do not 
doubt it, that when an animal is sick or has become 
weak with old age it loses the "herd instinct" and 
wanders off by itself. Such single animals could doubt- 
less be surrounded by wolves and killed. That this 
happens now and then is not to be doubted although, 
again, I have neither hearsay nor visual evidence in 
support. However, the killing of an animal that is 
about to die is of little significance in the life history 
of a herd or of a species. 

It is commonly said that in defending themselves 
from wolves ovibos form a hollow square or a circle 
with the big animals on the outside and the calves in 
the center. I believe I have said this myself. What 
I have really meant when I have said it has been 
that that is the way a herd behaves when dogs are 
sicked upon them and that I have inferred that would 
be the manner of their defense if attacked by a 
band of wolves. The fact remains, however, that 
I have never heard of a band being attacked by wolves 
nor have I seen any evidence leading me to think that 
it could occur even under the most extraordinary cir- 
cumstances. In my observation the attitude of ovibos 
towards wolves is that of a cow towards a cat in a 







OVIBOS ON THEIR NATIVE HeATH. 



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OviBOs IX Bronx Park, Xew York. 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 151 

barnyard. There is no doubt that a cow could defend 
herself successfully against the attacks of a cat, but 
it is equally certain that no cow has ever been forced 
to do it. So far as I know, that is only a slight over- 
statement of the situation as between the ovibos and 
the wolf. 

But although wolves do not attack ovibos, men do 
and so do dogs that are in the service of men. When 
so attacked ovibos form in squares or circles, as they 
are said to do in a discussion of the hypothetical de- 
fense against wolves. According to our usual reason- 
ing based upon the theory of evolution, we are bound 
to suppose that this method of defense has been de- 
veloped originally by ovibos as a protection against car- 
nivora of the wolf type. It is a perfect defense against 
wolves but it is the opposite of a defense against men 
armed with spears or with bows and arrows. The 
Eskimos will run up to such a band and shoot them 
all down with their bows. If they do not happen to 
have bows with them, they will lash their hunting 
knives to their walking sticks and stab the animals 
behind the shoulder until the last one has fallen. It 
seldom happens that a single animal of any band 
escapes from hunters, whether white or Eskimo, who 
know their nature. It does occur, as described by 
Pike, Whitney and others, that some members of a 
band and even whole bands sometimes escape from such 
novices as the Dog-Rib and Yellowknife Indians when 
they make their fearsome forays out into what is to 
them the dreadful "Barren Ground." 



152 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

It has been com m only assumed by zoologists that 
ovibos wbich once inhabited Kentucky and Erance 
became extinct there because the warming of the 
climate after the "ice age" brought bacteria or in- 
fluences even more directly climatic to which these 
animals had to succumb. It seems to me a mistake to 
go so far afield for one's explanation. It is commonly 
said that men as hunters spread over Europe and Amer- 
ica, following the ice northward in its retreat. Our 
experience shows to-day that ovibos and human hunters 
will never for many years inhabit the same district. 
Their ranges are mutually exclusive. It could not 
have failed to be the case in those prehistoric days as 
it is the case now that these animals are exterminated 
from every district that is inhabited by hunters. ISTot 
a single animal is likely to escape from any band that 
is seen by Eskimos or the tracks of which are once 
discovered. We have no reason to suppose that it would 
have been otherwise twenty or a hundred thousand 
years ago, for we think that those early men were 
armed with spears and bows and weapons pointed with 
stone and copper just as the Eskimos have been armed 
who, during the last half century, have killed down to 
the last animal the ovibos of Banks Island, which were 
reported as everywhere numerous when McClure was 
there with the Investigator. 

In any contest with men the defense of ovibos, per- 
fect against ordinary carnivora, is a method of suicide. 
But under domestication the one potential enemy be- 
comes their protector and they are themselves capable 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 153 

of defense against any other. Wolves are a menace to 
every other domestic animal hut not to these, except 
possihly to the new-horn calves. So far as wolves are 
concerned, the herdsman would not have to worry, 
unless for a month or two at the calving season. This 
is an important advantage of ovihos for the immediate 
future, although later the wolf will hecome so nearly 
extinct on the plains of the !N"orth that this merit will 
cease to he important. 

For half a century now the Darwinian theory of 
evolution has stood unshaken and apparently unshak- 
able although there have been additions and modifica- 
tions about as forecast by its great founder. One of 
these modifications is that, while Darwin believed 
acquired characters to be transmissible, it is now com- 
monly believed that they are not transmitted. From 
the biological point of view nothing can be more fool- 
ish than the often quoted remark of one of the leading 
literary lights of ISTew England that the time to begin 
educating the child is with its grandfather. Education 
is transmitted by social rather than by biological in- 
heritance and from the social point of view you may 
have whatever opinion you please about the wisdom 
of educating grandfathers so that they may transmit 
culture by association with their gTandchildren after 
these are born. Similarly, a grandfather ovibos if 
thoroughly tame will transmit by association his tame- 
ness to his remote progeny, but he will transmit none 
of it biologically. 

This explains such facts as are commonly reported 



154. THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

from the reindeer districts of northeastern Asia. On 
the same prairies there we have wild caribou and herds 
of domestic reindeer. The domestic herds we can trace 
back historically only to about 400 A. D., although 
we have other reasons to believe that their domestic 
ancestry really extends millenniums beyond. Presum- 
ably the wild herds have a wild ancestry dating back 
hundreds of thousands of years. If domesticity could 
be transmitted by blood, you would expect the progeny 
of the domestic animals to be by nature tamer than 
the progeny of the wild. It is a matter of common 
knowledge in those countries, however, that if you 
bring up in the domestic herds caribou calves that have 
back of them unbroken wild ancestry they will grow 
up as tame as the reindeer. Similarly, reindeer that 
escape into the wild herds presently become as wild as 
the wildest caribou. 

In Alaska it happens occasionally that a few caribou 
join the reindeer herd. When these are males they 
are preferable as work animals because of their greater 
size and strength. Mr. Carl Lomen, the president of 
Lomen and Company, at present the largest owners 
of Alaskan reindeer, tells me that he has personal 
knowledge of two caribou that joined a reindeer herd 
and were taken and trained as sled deer by the Eskimo 
herders. These caribou became more tractable in 
handling and easier to catch than any of the sled deer 
which had domestic ancestry and the opinion has 
grown up in Alaska that caribou are by their nature 
tamer and gentler than reindeer. It is probable, how- 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 155 

ever, that the natural tameness is the same and that 
the apparently greater tameness of these two was due 
to the fact that they were the favorites of their owners 
and were more handled and caressed than the others, 
from which they got their docility rather than from 
the blood. It would seem to prove too much and would 
be inexplicable biologically to say that the calves of 
animals which have always been wild are tamer than 
the calves of animals that have been tame for hundreds 
of generations. 

Evidence of similar meaning is furnished by horses. 
Dr. E. W. Nelson, Chief of the United States Biologi- 
cal Survey, told me the other day that within his own 
observation the tame horses that escaped and joined 
wild bands in California took only weeks to become 
to all appearances equally wild. Eor a greater reason 
it is true that the progeny of these tame horses if born 
among wild bands will be exactly as wild as those 
horses that have been wild perhaps since the time of 
the early Spaniards, 

Applying this principle to the problem of domesti- 
cating the ovibos, we see that the animals should become 
as tame in one generation as in ten or a hundred. Of 
course, in the breeding of any animals, a degree of gen- 
tleness can be secured by systematically killing off the 
specially vicious, allowing only the milder ones to 
breed. In that sense only can the domesticity of ovibos 
be increased beyond what is attainable in one or two 
generations. 

When a mother ovibos is killed the little calf wiU 



156 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

frequently follow the hunters, showing no sign of 
fear. There are many authorities to share with me 
the responsibility of this statement. I shall select 
Admiral Peary, who says : ^ 

"Our slumbers were undisturbed except by 'Sambo,' a little 
coal-black musk-calf. His mother was the last cow killed by 
Matt, and he the smallest of calves. After we had skinned 
the cow, the little fellow persisted in placing himself between 
my legs, and, in this position, accompanied us to the sledge, 
and after the camp was made, seemed to want to come to bed 
with us, I curled him up and covered him with a corner of 
the skin, once or twice, but this did not seem to suit. Though 
I pitied the little fellow, and was considerably annoyed by his 
performances, I could not help laughing at them. He per- 
sisted in nibbling at my hair, licking my nose, and pawing my 
face with his hoofs, which, though small, were by no means 
soft. Though he was undoubtedly hungrj'^, I could not detect 
either the hunger-note or that of fear in any of his four or 
five distinct baby-cries." 

I have personally always worked under such cir- 
cumstances that keeping ovibos in captivity even 
temporarily was not feasible. Several of my Eskimos 
had, however, kept calves for varying periods. 
They all agreed on their docility. One of the Eskimos, 
Illun, captured two which had the following history: 
He kept them in his camp for about half a year until 
all the dogs of the neighborhood recognized and became 
friendly with the two calves. He then sold them to 

3 "Northward Over the 'Great Ice,'" by R. E. Peary, Vol. II, 
p. 485. 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 157 

a whaling captain, who had them tethered on shore 
unprotected while the sailors went aboard ship. While 
so tied the calves were attacked hy strange dogs and 
one of them was killed. The other was taken to San 
Francisco and later, I helieve, sent to ISTew York where 
it became one of the animals observed by Dr. W. T. 
Horn a day. 

In Bronx Park, IsTew York, some ovibos have lived 
as long as seven years. Dr. Hornaday says that cer- 
tain of them have become extremely vicious. When 
one remembers that in zoological gardens animals are 
kept in little stockaded enclosures, viciousness does not 
seem a strange result for almost any animal. It is my 
opinion that if reared and treated as barnyard cattle 
ovibos would be as gentle as Jersey cows or as sheep. 

It is well known, however, that neither the Jersey 
bull nor the domestic ram is an animal of a particu- 
larly gentle disposition, and we may suppose for argu- 
ment's sake that ovibos would become equally untract- 
able with age. Texas longhorn bulls and various other 
varieties of cattle, even including Jersey bulls, are agile 
animals, armed with sharp horns and, therefore, ex- 
tremely dangerous when vicious. Ovibos if equally 
vicious would not be nearly so dangerous. Through 
their clumsy anatomy they cannot run so fast nor are 
their horns as well shaped for inflicting deadly injury. 
When we remember that hundreds of thousands of wild 
cattle are being handled in various countries every year 
with few casualties, it is easy to see that even should 
the adult ovibos prove to have the vilest of tempers, 



158 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

the problem of handling would not be as serious as the 
similar problems that are being solved daj by day 
"with range cattle. 

As stated above, caribou calves born in captivity and 
brought up vi^ith reindeer become as tame as reindeer, 
which means that they are as tame as sheep. It is, 
therefore, probable that ovibos born in captivity will 
be as tame as sheep; it is certain that no matter how 
vicious they may be they can be handled easily. Ovibos 
will be domesticated whenever a well-considered attempt 
to do so is made. 

A difficulty that is merely apparent is the question 
of whether they will breed in captivity. There will 
be no "captivity" in the ordinary sense of that word. 
Ovibos have not the intelligence to realize that they 
are the property of men nor will they themselves know 
whether they are wild or domestic if they are feeding 
upon ranges where human beings are rarely seen. To 
keep them extremely docile it will doubtless be neces- 
sary to associate with them every day, but if it were 
found that such continuous association interfered at 
all with their breeding habits they could be left alone 
as our range cattle commonly used to be for months 
at a time and even half a year. In Melville Island 
we associated with the wild herds so intimately that 
they might as well have been our property. Take, for 
instance, the case of a herd observed in the autumn 
of 1916 near our winter camp at Liddon Gulf. 

My chief assistant, Storkerson, said to me one morn- 
ing that he thought the supply of meat for winter was 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 159 

not adequate and suggested that we butcher a herd 
of about forty ovibos which we could see feeding some 
seven or eight miles away. I approved of this and 
he took several of the men with him. They killed 
the herd and spent that day and the next in skinning 
the animals and getting the meat ready. On their 
way home from the kill they ran into a smaller herd 
which was about half way. Had we seen them sooner 
they would probably have been the herd killed but 
now we had no use for them. 

The men were passing with several dog teams and 
the dogs commenced barking and struggling to get at 
the ovibos, but were restrained. This noise and con- 
fusion alarmed the animals enough so they took a 
defensive formation and remained in that position for 
a little while or until the men and dogs had disappeared 
beyond their sight and hearing. They then resumed 
their feeding on the identical spot. During the fol- 
lowing several days the men engaged in freighting 
home the meat frequently passed this band, which on 
some occasions was only fifty or a hundred yards away 
from their sled trail and on others perhaps three or 
four hundred yards. On the first few occasions they 
took defensive formations and stood still while the cav- 
alcade of men and dogs was passing. Later the dogs 
got so used to them that they ceased barking and 
struggling and pulled quietly on their loads. There 
was a corresponding quietness in the ovibos herd, due 
partly to their getting used to us and partly to there 
being no longer a great row made when we were in 



160 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

their vicinity. Eventually they ceased entirely to 
pay attention and I doubt that they even glanced at 
lis as we passed. They kept feeding in that locality 
for several weeks until their slow progress brought 
them to a rocky and barren ridge, whereupon they 
made a march across it one day and the next morning 
were not in sight. 

When animals called wild behave so it is absurd 
to suppose their being owned on private or government 
ranges would interfere seriously with their rate of mul- 
tiplying. 

I do not know how fast they breed. It seems likely 
that the first calf is born when the mother is two or 
three years old and that she has a calf a year for about 
the same number of years as do our cattle. This is 
merely an inference from the fact that it takes them 
about as long to grow to maturity as it does our domestic 
cattle. 

The strangest thing about the ovibos and one diffi- 
cult to reconcile with our theories is that the period 
at which the calves are born does not correspond with 
the seasons in Melville Island. We cannot speak very 
definitely but there appear to be six or eight weeks 
in the spring between the birth of the earliest and the 
latest calves. The earliest calves are born while the 
weather is extremely cold. We have observed many 
cows that obviously have had calves no longer have them 
by midsummer. It is possible that some of these 
calves have been killed by wolves but I think it more 
likely that they have been frozen to death within a few 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 161 

hours of birth because of being born too early in the 
season, and that the calves that do survive are those 
of late birth. There is considerable difference in the 
sizes of the surviving calves, so that a few of the early 
ones appear to live through. They are so well furred 
when born that they are naturally safe from freezing 
if they live long enough for their hair to become dry. 
Under domestication this irregularity in the breeding 
habits of ovibos can be easily controlled and will be a 
source of no difficulty although it now appears to be 
the main cause that keeps down their numbers in dis- 
tricts where they are not hunted by man. 

In the letter to Colonel Roosevelt I enclosed a sample 
of ovibos wool with the information then available, 
which was to this effect: Most of the animal's body is 
covered with long, straggling hairs which do not ap- 
pear to be shed any more than a horse sheds its mane 
or tail. In the roots of this straggling hair grows the 
wool. This is not conspicuous on commercial skins 
such as we occasionally find as laprobes or rugs, be- 
cause the furrier prefers skins that have been killed 
in early autumn before the wool develops. Any that 
come on the market with large quantities of wool are 
curried, and "what little remains is hidden in the roots 
of the hair. 

In life the wool is inconspicuous until early autumn. 
During the winter it gradually develops until towards 
spring ovibos resembles a sheep and especially when 
viewed from above. In April and May this wool 
loosens and is shed and the animals are frequently seen 



162 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

dragging along so much wool that it appears like a 
curtain on either side of them, hiding the legs in a 
side view, and trails behind them for a yard or two as 
they walk. Under domestication it would appear 
simple to pluck or curry this wool somewhat as it used 
to be the custom in Iceland to curry instead of shearing 
sheep. In the currying process a few of the long hairs 
will come out with the wool and be mixed with it, 
which will be a disadvantage for some uses although 
a possible advantage for others. 

Shearing ovibos has two principal difficulties, the 
seriousness of neither of which can as yet be properly 
estimated. One is that the hair will all be removed no 
less than the wool, which may interfere with the quality 
of the wool and may also, for all we know, be a dis- 
advantage with relation to the next year's crop of wool, 
for the hair probably does not grow as fast as the wool. 
Secondly, it appears possible that close shearing may 
be fatal to the animals if a period of severe weather 
follows while they are as yet insufficiently protected 
by the new coat. 

It occurs to one to consider whether ovibos would 
thrive in southern latitudes. This is an interesting 
problem but the interest is in the main academic. We 
already have such domestic animals as sheep and cattle 
that are fairly weU. suited to our needs and to culti- 
vation in southern lands. The great importance of 
the ovibos is that they are northerly animals, capable 
of converting into meat and wool the unbelievable 
quantities of grass that grow in arctic and subarctic 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 163 

lands. Cattle and sheep could be raised in the arctic 
but it would not pay because the season when stabling 
is necessary would be long. In ovibos we have, how- 
ever, an animal which (like the reindeer) needs no 
barn to shelter it, no hay to feed it, and which is as 
native to the most northerly lands as any animal can 
be to any climate. 

Summing up their characteristics further, ovibos are 
better than cattle because in addition to meat they 
supply wool; they are better than sheep because in 
addition to supplying wool they are several times as 
large; they have the advantage over any of our grazing 
domestic animals in that they defend themselves 
against wolves, are naturally disinclined to roam, are 
probably docile in disposition and even if vicious are 
too clumsy to be as dangerous as a bull or a stallion. 

On the basis of an outline such as the above, I ap- 
pealed to Colonel Roosevelt, and to the other eminent 
men to whom I sent duplicates of the letter, for assist- 
ance in a movement which I thought would be of great 
importance to the world as a whole and of special im- 
portance to those countries that have northerly posses- 
sions — the United States (Alaska), Canada, Denmark 
(Greenland), and Russia (Siberia). I received the 
following characteristic reply: 

"Nkw York, 
March 23rd, 1918. 
"My dear Mr. Stefansson : 

"To-day I received your letters of May 17th, 1916, and Feb. 
0th, 1917. I haven't the faintest idea of whether this letter 



164. THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

will reacli you or not, but I must write to tell you how greatly 
I appi'eciate hearing from you and how heartily I admire the 
wonderful work you have done. . . . 

"Now, as regards the muskox. I most emphatically wish 
your project well, not merely as regards this war but as regards 
the future of the country. Our domestic animals are merely 
those of Asia, because it was in Asia that civilization first 
arose, and in consequence, as it penetrated in other continents, 
men found it easier to use the animals already tamed, than to 
tame new ones. The llama of the Andes is almost the only 
exception. It is a capital misfortune that the African eland 
has not been tamed. It is a capital misfortune that the muskox 
has not been tamed. To tame it would mean possibilities of 
civilization in northernmost America which are now utterly 
lacking. . . . 

"With hearty good wishes, 
"Faithfully yours, 

(Signed) Theodore Roosevelt." 
"Mr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 
Harvard Club, 
New York City." 



Witli regard to bringing the ovibos as a domestic 
animal to the attention of the Danes, I took advantage 
in the fall of 1918 of the visit to the United States of 
Prince Axel of Denmark. I placed the case before 
him with reference to Greenland on a day's outing 
when I was his fellow guest on a fishing trip, l^ot 
being intimately acquainted with royalty and suppos- 
ing that they have many distractions, I thought the 
Prince might possibly forget. I learned from him 
that he expected to see Colonel Roosevelt on his way to 
Europe, so I wrote the Colonel asking him to remind 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 165 

the Prince upon occasion^ whereupon he wrote me as 
follows : 

"New York, 
October 28th, 1918. 
"Mt dear Mr. Stefanssok : 

"I don't know that I shall see Prince Axel, but I shall cer- 
tainly do all I can to back up the musk ox project, if I do see 
him. If I can do anything with the Canadian Government, or 
with our own, please command me. 

"Faithfully yours, 
(Signed) Theodore Roosevelt." 

I had only one conversation with Colonel Roosevelt 
on the subject of the domestication of ovibos and that 
amounted to little beyond his saying that he was anx- 
ious to discuss the matter fully and make plans for 
action as soon as the political campaign was over. Be- 
fore it was over he died. 

Since the proposal to domesticate ovibos was orig- 
inally made there has come to hand no considerable 
amount of valuable information with regard to any- 
thing except the wool. From ovibos skins which were 
brought south by our expedition (Canadian Arctic 
Expedition, 1913-18) and from others belonging to 
Captain Henry Toke Munn, who has a trading station 
in northern Baffin Island, we were able to get together 
fifty or sixty pounds of wool. Some was worked by 
hand into socks and mittens in the ordinary "old- 
fashioned" way, but this yielded little definite informa- 
tion from the commercial point of view. Secretaries 
Lane and Redfield, then members of President Wilson's 



166 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

Cabinet, became interested and a small sample was 
submitted through them to the United States Bureau 
of Standards, but their report was inconclusive. Cer- 
tain Canadian manufacturers of woolen cloths under- 
took to have the wool tested and received considerable 
quantities of it, but apparently were not really inter- 
ested or else did not have the proper facilities, for so 
far as I know this has not as yet come to anything. 

The wool secured from Captain Munn (about 40 
pounds) was handed over to Professor Aldred F. 
Barker, head of the Textiles Department of Leeds 
University. Through a period of months he has con- 
ducted experiments of all sorts. The full report is 
not as yet available but we are already able to say that 
the heat-retaining qualities of ovibos wool seem to be 
at least as good as the best domestic sheep product. 
The wool will take dye readily. Its soft, native brown 
is at present a very fashionable color and seems, there- 
fore, suitable, but it can be bleached a pure white 
inexpensively by processes already in use. The cloth 
can be woven by machinery used for ordinary wool; 
no special machinery or invention is necessary for 
separating the long hairs from the wool when such 
separation is desired. For certain purposes it is an 
advantage to have the hair mixed with the wool. The 
hair if separated from the wool will be of some value 
as a by-product. The pure wool fabric will have ap- 
proximately the softness of cashmere, and, what many 
will consider important, the cloth will not shrink even 
when washed in hot water and rubbed. Professor 



THE DOMESTICATION OF OVIBOS 167 

Barker wants it understood that these statements are 
for the present tentative and may have to be modified 
to some slight extent. On the other hand, it may also 
occur that some of* the favorable statements can be 
made more emphatic when the full information is 
available. 

With regard to the quantity of wool per animal, no 
information is available beyond the observation of Dr. 
,W. T. Hornaday, who has had several ovibos under his 
care in the 'New York Zoological Garden at various 
times. Apparently the wool was never weighed animal 
by animal, but it seems safe to say that the quantity 
per animal is greater than that of the domestic sheep, 
taken by the weight of the cleaned product. 

But although (as said above) we have no important 
new information about the ovibos since I wrote my 
letter to Colonel Eoosevelt, we have at least accumu- 
lated abundant evidence to confirm all the main points 
there set down. This is chiefly the result of ofiicial 
investigation by the Canadian Government as to the 
!North as a suitable place for herds of domestic ovibos 
and of them as animals suitable for domestication, as 
explained elsewhere in this book. 



CHAPTEE VII 
TEAITSPOLAE COMMEKCE BY AIR 

A GLANCE at a map of the northern hemisphere 
shows that the Arctic Ocean is in effect a huge Medi- 
terranean. It lies between its surrounding continents 
somewhat as the Mediterranean lies between Europe 
and Africa. It has in the past been looked upon as 
an impassable Mediterranean. In the near future it 
will not only become passable but will become a favorite 
route, at least at certain times of year, safer, more com- 
fortable, and much shorter than any other air route that 
lies over the oceans that separate the present-day 
centers of population. 

We shall "soon" be booking our passage from iJTew 

York to Liverpool by dirigible or plane or some other 

form of aircraft in as matter of course a way as we 

now book our passage by steamer. Our estimates 

differ as to how far in the future that period lies, 

according to our temperaments. When Tennyson 

spoke of "aerial navies grappling in the central blue," 

he was a poet and a prophet, for no inventions were 

then available the mere development of which could 

make such dreams a reality. When we now speak of 

the coming transoceanic commerce, we are no longer 

prophets, for we are merely considering the daily and 

yearly increase in efficiency of inventions which we 

168 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 169 

already have. The thought is, however, in the back of 
our minds that in addition to such increasing perfec- 
tion of known instruments we shall eventually have also 
entirely new devices that are at present as much in the 
future as were even the crudest approaches to an aerial 
navy in the time of Tennyson. 

Although our estimates of when transoceanic pas- 
senger and mail service by air shall be no longer a 
novelty differ according to our temperaments, they 
vary only between years in the vision of the optimist 
and decades in the gloomier view of the pessimist. 
In five months, say the enthusiastic commentators on 
the news despatches of the day, the Zeppelin Company 
will have a regular service between Spain and South 
America ; in five years such things will come, say those 
who occupy what is not far from the middle road; in 
fifty years, said Mr. Balfour the other day at Wash- 
ington. But whenever that time comes there will be 
in England not only those who desire to book passage 
by air for ISTew York but also others who have pressing 
affairs awaiting them in Tokyo. Then will arise the 
choice of routes, and there is no doubt that in the 
summer season at least it will be thought an absurdity 
for those in a hurry to go from England to Japan by 
way of either ISTew York or Montreal. They will fly 
over the north polar ocean./— V§ 

There are few nowadays who do not agree that the 
world is round, but there are almost equally few who 
apply the principle of the world's roundness consist- 
ently when they think about going from place to place. 



170 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

The polar ocean has so long been a barrier that when 
we consider transport from Europe to America, from 
America to Asia, we think only in terms of east and 
west; indeed we speak of the N'ear and the Far East. 
Since the days of Magellan it has been a commonplace 
that you can go east by sailing west. It is about to 
become an equal commonplace that you can go east 
by flying north. 

In Europe the days of Columbus and Magellan, 
were days of intellectual renaissance. People had not 
generally known even that the world was round, but 
when that novel view was presented to them they drew 
from it all its proper conclusions. One of the most 
fruitful of these was that you could reach China not 
only by sailing west but also by sailing north, and it 
was soon realized that the shortest route from Europe 
to China was a northerly one. In navigation we call 
this the principle of great circle sailing. But in cer- 
tain places lands barred the way of the navigator and 
everywhere the "frozen ocean" was a bar to ships of 
that day which were not only imperfect from our mod- 
ern point of view but also manned by sailors who in 
spite of their courage and resource were products of 
the south and novices in the strange seas around the 
Pole. There was failure after failure of great ex- 
peditions until finally it was agreed that although a 
northwest passage was possible (as shown seventy-five 
years ago by the work of the series of expeditions 
known as the Franklin Search) it was not a "practical" 
route and that neither time nor expense could be saved 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 171 

by using it. Even before the days of the Suez and 
the Panama canals it was cheaper and safer to sail 
around the Horn or the Cape of Good Hope than to 
navigate the northwest passage around America or 
the northeast passage around Asia. Although the dif- 
ficulty of making these northerly voyages is in the 
public mind grossly exaggerated, the fact remains that 
for surface craft they really are not "practical" routes 
from the commercial point of view. 

The thing that makes either the northwest passage 
or the northeast passage "impractical" is the ice float- 
ing upon an ocean. It is not a continuous layer of 
ice. There are instead almost infinite numbers of 
cakes varying as to surface area and thickness and con- 
tinually drifting about before the wind and current. 
Even in mid-winter the greatest size of these floes is 
not over fifty miles in diameter or an average thickness 
of more than four to six feet. Admiral Peary made 
the estimate, with which most observers have agreed, 
that even in the period of the intensest winter cold 
about twenty-five per cent, of the surface of the polar 
ocean is either open water or ice so thin that a man 
could not walk on it. Plowing through such thin ice 
a powerful ship would lose only from ten to twenty-five 
per cent, of its speed. As the weather becomes warmer 
towards spring the percentage of open water in the 
polar ocean increases and it is probable that in mid- 
summer considerably more than half the surface area 
is free from ice. At that period also the biggest ice 
cakes are far smaller than in mid-winter. It may be 



172 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

considered a certainty that in July no ice field in the 
Arctic is fifty miles in its least diameter. I doubt 
that even the greatest diagonal of any cake would be 
that much. 

Although realizing the applicability of both aircraft 
and submarines to commerce and warfare in our own 
latitudes, we have not adequately realized their sig- 
nificance in solving after four hundred years the prob- 
lem of the northwest passage and giving us at last a 
short route from Europe to the Far East. Whether 
it be in five years or in fifty years that aerial trans- 
oceanic commerce in tropical and temperate latitudes 
becomes a commonplace, transpolar commerce will 
then be equally common for at least the summer months. 
At present, passenger liners crossing the Atlantic have 
winter routes that differ sometimes by several hundred 
miles from their summer routes. Aircraft will doubt- 
less be even more free in their variations of route ac- 
cording to season. Indeed, it is probable that the 
weather bureaus, which will then have multiplied by 
at least ten their present great importance to commerce, 
will publish daily or several times a day maps of the 
air routes, the information of which will be conveyed 
by wireless messages to the commanders of aircraft, 
enabling them to vary from hour to hour the courses 
they steer as to latitude and longitude and altitude. 
With the sailor on the ocean it is, outside of the trade 
wind belt, almost a matter of accident whether the 
winds blow him fair or foul. In the air there may 
be a fair wind a certain distance up and a head wind 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 173 

either higher or lower and the airman may change his 
wind from fair to foul by raising or lowering his 
craft. It is, therefore, impossible to say now just 
where the transpolar air routes will lie, and indeed 
they will probably always vary from day to day. But 
wherever they lie they are sure to be advantageous 
commercially and popular with passengers at least dur- 
ing the season corresponding to that in which the 
tourist of to-day sails to Alaska or ISTorway or Spits- 
bergen to see the midnight sun. 

For the coming popularity of the transpolar air 
routes there are at least five main reasons. We shall 
in the first instance consider these in their relation 
to the needs of a passenger who wants to go from Eng- 
land to Japan. 

Advantage I: The most practical route of the recent 
past between England and Japan has led by way of 
ocean steamers to Montreal, the Canadian railways to 
Vancouver and then by the northerly route along the 
Aleutian Islands to Japan. The length of this route 
is given by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, 
which covers it all either by steamer or rail, at 9,928.8 
miles from Liverpool to Yokohama. But the distance 
from a railway terminus at the north of Great Britain 
to the north end of Japan proper where railway travel 
could be again resumed is by air route only 6,500 miles. 

To a man in a hurry, whether for personal trans- 
portation or the transportation of urgent despatches, 
a saving of half the distance, meaning also a saving of 
half the time, will in some cases be extremely impor- 



yh-sj 



■,n^' 



174 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

tant. But the route has other advantages which in 
some cases may be even more attractive than the 
saving in distance and time. 

Advantage II : It is said that helium is for dirigibles 
a gas much preferable to hydrogen, not only because 
it will not explode but also because it does not expand 
rapidly with heat. However, helium is at present 
exceedingly rare, so rare indeed that even were the 
costliness of it no consideration we are at a loss to see 
how any considerable number of dirigibles could be 
operated with that gas. Furthermore, there are many 
countries which are not knovvnti to contain any sources 
of helium, and while the United States and Canada 
are considered to be fortunate in possessing helium 
resources, other countries have by that much a greater 
reason to feel themselves handicapped by certain un- 
desirable qualities of the hydrogen they must perforce 
use for dirigibles. 

Hydrogen expands and contracts not so much under 
the influence of heat as registered by thermometers at 
the earth's surface as through the direct production of 
heat within the gas-bag itself when the rays of the 
morning sun strike it. Paint the bag silver or any 
color you will, the amount of heat locally generated 
by the sun's rays is very great. The hydrogen ex- 
pands and you can avoid a bursting of the bag only 
by allowing it to escape. This is the chief factor 
which limits the length of balloon voyages. A certain 
amount of gas must be allowed to escape each day 
and reciprocally a certain amount of ballast has to 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 175 

be thrown out each night to prevent the balloon or 
dirigible from settling to earth. 

But this alternation of day and night which seems 
a necessary evil to those habituated to southern lati- 
tudes is not a factor in the polar regions, whether in 
mid-winter or mid-summer. We shall not, for the 
present, 'Consider winter voyages. With relation to 
summer journeys, the speed of the dirigible that has 
already crossed the Atlantic was great enough so that 
had it started north from Scotland with a full supply 
of hydrogen just after a spring or summer sunrise, it 
could have reached the area of perpetual daylight near 
Iceland in fifteen or twenty hours. This means that 
such a dirigible would not be overtaken by darkness 
at all in the beginning of its trip and would meet the 
darkness only after crossing the polar area and pene- 
trating well into Asia. On the major portion of the 
voyage from England to Japan there would, accord- 
ingly, be no great expansion or contraction of the 
hydrogen, no considerable loss of buoyancy or neces- 
sity for throwing out ballast, giving not only an in- 
creased cruising radius to the dirigible but also an 
increased freight-carrying capacity. 

Advantage III: In air voyages no less than sea 
voyages things will doubtless occasionally go wrong. 
This brings us to another great advantage of the north- 
ern route. If you get into trouble you would rather 
that it happened in daylight than in darkness, and 
whatever difficulties you might encounter you could 
more readily meet through this reason on the northern 



176 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

route than on any other. In stories of sea tragedies 
that have overtaken passenger liners at night, the stop- 
page of the engines, the failure of the light plants and 
the plunging of the whole ship into inky darkness, is 
often the most terrifying feature. Just when a crisis 
brings the need of swift and pertinent action, every 
effort is thwarted because no man can see what to do 
or what others are doing. Under the perpetual sun 
of the polar summer we shall always be free from at 
least this attribute of southern tragedy. 

Advantage IV: If the accident that befalls the 
dirigible is an explosion of gas the case is well-nigh 
hopeless whatever the location, as has recently been 
only too clearly shown by the dreadful wreck of the 
ZR-2 over a populous city in England. But where 
the difficulty is a minor one, SOS signals can be sent 
out while the gas-bag is gradually descending. On 
the polar route, although the surface of the sea may 
not be more than half covered by substantial cakes of 
ice, there would be a reasonable certainty of landing 
on one of them. Were there a forced landing in open 
water, it would presumably not be more than a few 
miles to the nearest ice floe which could be reached by 
such life rafts or other devices as a dirigible would 
naturally carry on transoceanic voyages in all latitudes. 

It may be said that it would not be any fun to be 
forced to land on an ice island. But it would be a great 
deal more fun than having to land among tumbling 
and breaking seas in the mid-Atlantic. One effect 
of the presence of ice upon the ocean in the vicinity 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 177 

is that even in a gale there are no heavy seas. Indeed, 
if the ice is abundant no swell is noticeable in the 
heaviest gale, and the waves on the patches of open 
water are only such as one may find on a pond or a 
small lake. If SOS calls, containing as they always 
do position as to latitude and longitude, are sent out 
while the dirigible is descending to the ice or immedi- 
ately after the landing, the party would have days 
or weeks and even months for opportunities of rescue. 
It is said by some of the enthusiastic advocates of 
transatlantic air travel that we shall eventually have 
in mid-Atlantic huge rafts, floating islands in effect, 
that will be rescue stations for aircraft in distress. 
While that idea may not be impractical, it will at least 
be difficult and expensive. On the polar route IsTature 
has already provided a sprinkling of these rafts far 
greater in number and far more stable than any such 
artificial rafts can ever be expected to be. 

Advantage V: The last to be enumerated of the 
advantages of the transpolar summer air route may be 
spoken of as the tourist value of the perpetual day- 
light. "The Midnight Sun" now draws people every 
summer to the ISTorth in ships. When air travel be- 
comes popular, the Midnight Sun will still have its 
attraction for that sort of person and will be one of the 
talking points in selling transportation over the north- 
ern route. 

The transpolar route will become more important 
decade by decade. In Siberia, practically speaking. 



178 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

we have as yet only one great trunk railway. It does, 
however, tap and make accessible many of the huge 
rivers that flow north and there are great steamers on 
these rivers that make the Arctic locally accessible. 
The Trans-Siberian Railway runs in large part through 
the wheat belt of Asia and the potential cereal belt 
extends far north of it. We shall, accordingly, have 
eventually the development of other great east and 
west railways and of many spurs running north and 
south. Tomsk, Yakutsk, Irkutsk and the rest of the 
cities we have heard of and many of which we have 
never heard, will be growing into Chicagos and Win- 
nipegs and Calgarys. The centers of civilized popu- 
lation in Siberia and in Canada alike will be continu- 
ally moving north and there will be more and more 
occasion for the use of the polar route, a route that 
will never be directly of great importance to Rome or 
Buenos Aires or Hong-Kong but of vast consequence 
to England and Japan, Norway and Russia, Siberia 
and Canada, and through them of indirect consequence 
even to the tropical lands. 

To people little acquainted with the Arctic as most 
of us are and misinformed as nearly all of us are, 
there appear to be many difficulties to the polar route. 
Most of these do not exist. Indeed where we imagine 
positive difficulties, there may in reality be positive 
advantages. Take, for instance, the matter of summer 
temperature. 

"We have all of us learned in school the truth that 
per square mile per hour there is more heat received 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 179 

from the sun at the earth's equator than anywhere else. 
But in the minds of most of us this truth is only a 
half-truth and therefore the most dangerous sort of 
error, for we have commonly failed to grasp its inter- 
pretative corollary that, while each hour brings most 
heat to the equator, the hours of summer sunshine 
increase in number as we go away from the equator. 
This would give a perfect balance if the hours of sun- 
light per day increased proportionately as the heat per 
hour decreases. This is not the case. In mid-summer 
as you go north the length of day increases more 
rapidly than the amount of heat per hour decreases, 
so that although the heat per hour received at Winni- 
peg is less than it is in New Orleans, the amount of 
heat received per day is greater,^ 

But the difference between New Orleans and Win- 
nipeg is not as great as that between Winnipeg and a 
place as far north of it as New Orleans is south (and 
no one will assert that New Orleans or Winnipeg is any- 
where near the limit of human habitability. ) For 
something like five weeks every summer there is more 
heat per day received from the sun on a square mile 
at the top of the atmosphere at the North Pole than 
at the equator. There is, however, in many places 
in the remote North a local refrigeration that tempers 
what otherwise would be unbearable heat. The 
winters there are long and under certain conditions 
a great deal of "cold" may be stored up. In the 
polar basin we have an ocean thousands of miles 

1 See footnote, p. 255, post. 



180 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

across and thousands of feet deep and all the water 
during the long winter months is chilled to the 
vicinity of 30° Fahrenheit above zero. There is also 
a certain amount of ice floating around on the 
surface and this ice is approximately the same tempera- 
ture as the water. This furnishes a huge store 
of "cold" to neutralize the terrific downpour of the 
summer sun's heat, and it is probable that the air ten 
feet above the middle of the polar ocean is seldom 
warmer even in July than 50° or 55° Fahrenheit above 
zero. Higher up it would be somewhat warmer, and 
general flying conditions would be about the same over 
the polar ocean in July as in France or England in late 
winter and early spring. 

But the conditions in the polar lands differ entirely 
from those of the polar seas. Furthermore, they may 
vary extremely from one land to another, whereas the 
polar seas in general have a uniform condition. 
Greenland is one extreme among the lands. A large 
part of it is covered with ice and you have, as in the 
ocean, a huge quantity of stored-up "cold" to neutralize 
the great heat of the summer sun. Still, it is the testi- 
mony of those who have traveled over the icecap of 
Greenland in midsummer, as it is the testimony of 
those who have spent the midsummer among the float- 
ing ice of the polar ocean, that the weather seems at 
times extremely hot. In the case, for instance, of 
Storkerson's party of my own expedition, who spent 
the summer of 1918 drifting on the sea ice between two 
and three hundred miles north of Alaska (and there- 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 181 

fore five or six hundred miles north of the arctic 
circle), the men frequently sat around outdoors dressed 
only in cotton undershirts. The reason for not 
stripping to the skin was the fear of getting sunburnt, 
of which there is even more danger on a snow surface 
than on the shimmering waters of lakes or oceans. 

But Greenland is a peculiar island in that its great 
altitude enables it to store up a large amount of "cold." 
In a few other northerly islands there are glaciers of 
moderate size (Franz Josef Island, Spitsbergen, North 
Devon) and glaciers of intermediate size (as in Elles- 
mere Island and Heiberg Island) but there are vast 
areas of polar lowlands where the little snow that falls 
in winter disappears like magic in the early spring, 
and where the sun beats down for month after month 
upon a soil clad with vegetation. The Encyclopedia 
Britannica says: "Patches of perpetual snow occur in 
Eastern Siberia only on the mountains of the far 
north." If there are any patches of permanent snow 
(glaciers) on the lowlands of arctic Siberia, they have 
not yet been discovered. It is certain that if any are 
discovered they will prove exceedingly small. In other 
words, we can take it for certain that there is far less 
permanent ice and snow in the lowland of north Siberia 
than there is in the mountains of Mexico. In arctic 
Canada we have lowland everywhere except in the 
Yukon, and on arctic lowlands there are no glaciers. 
In the mountains of the Yukon there are small glaciers 
but by no means as large as those of Switzerland or of 
the state of Washington. In Siberia and Canada there 



182 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

are, therefore, millions of square miles, indeed an aggre- 
gate much larger than the whole United States, where 
there is no stored-up "cold" to moderate the heat of the 
arctic daylight except the slight chill of the frozen sub- 
soil, and that is kept from having much effect on the air 
by the insulation over it of the cloak of vegetation. 
Accordingly (as explained more fully in Chapter II), 
we find temperatures of 95° in the shade more fre- 
quently on the arctic prairies than in IsTew York, al- 
though deaths from heat prostration are in that city 
not unknown. 'No thoughtful person will, therefore, 
suppose that transpolar air journeys will in summer be 
interfered with by low temperatures. 

From the principle that the sun pours down each 
summer day more heat upon the polar regions than 
upon the equator, you deduce that summer travel will 
not be uncomfortable because of extreme cold; neither 
will it be uncomfortable because of extreme heat, for 
that can always be regulated by rising into higher and 
cooler air strata. We further deduce that a dovmpour 
of heat upon the northern soil when accompanied by 
sufficient rain (as it is) will cover the earth with a 
carpet of vegetation. This is true except where moun- 
tains are snow-covered because of their altitude or 
where the ground is nearly solid rock, both of which 
conditions are rare. A landing on the polar prairie 
cannot, therefore, be supposed to be less pleasant than 
a landing in any other land except for two reasons, 
one of which is merely temporary but the other of 
which may prove to be permanent. The temporary 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 183 

difficulty will be that summer hotels and way stations, 
although we already find them in such islands as Spits- 
bergen far north of the arctic circle, will, nevertheless, 
be more scattered than in other parts of the world. 

The permanent difiiculty is the swarms of insect life 
that are bred in the swelter of the polar summer. A 
striking feature of northern topography is the great 
number of lakes of all sizes. These are beautiful from 
a distance and will have their value in airplane travel, 
for upon them flying-boats can land in summer and on 
their smooth ice airplanes equipped with skids can 
land in winter. But in the summer these lakes and 
their surrounding marshes breed denser swarms of 
insects (notably mosquitoes) than are found in any 
other part of the world. This condition is about at 
the worst on the arctic circle. As you go north from 
it the fly pests are less and less obnoxious. In the 
polar islands mosquitoes are not bad except on the larger 
ones, such as Victoria or Baffin, where the sun can 
generate extreme heat in districts remote from the 
immediate influence of the ocean. The smaller islands 
are so cooled by the sea breezes that in most of them 
the insect life is a minor annoyance or absent. 

It is true that certain parts of the polar regions are 
given to summer fogs, but fogs lie low over the ocean 
and presumably the dirigibles and airplanes would nav- 
igate in the clear sunlight above them. 

In our consideration of transpolar commerce we 
come naturally to the matter of base stations where 
petroleum and food and rescue aircraft, corresponding 



184 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

to the coast guard vessels of to-day, will be kept in 
constant readiness. Many of these base stations may 
be supplied and will be supplied by railways, by ocean 
steamers or by river steamers. A glance at the map of 
the polar air route from England to Japan shows that 
it requires no long jumps between places that are now 
reached with fair regularity by ocean ships or by river 
steamers.^ 

How accessible are many of the seemingly remote 
fur-trading outposts of arctic Canada and Siberia many 
of us fail to realize. The other day I was talking with 
an exceptionally well-informed man who had himself 
spent several years in polar regions (in the northwest 
of Alaska). I was astounded to find that he supposed 
it would take a year to make a trip from l^ew York 
to the mouth of the Mackenzie River by way of Winni- 
peg and Edmonton, using no air vehicles but only rail- 
ways and river steamers. As a matter of fact, it would 
take about twenty-five days from ISTew York to the 
mouth of the Mackenzie, and regular railway and 
steamboat tickets could be bought if not in ISTew York 
at least in Winnipeg. Under normal peacetime condi- 
tions a similar surprise would await those who desired 
to reach the north coast of Siberia by journeying 
from the Trans-Siberian Railway down one or another 
of the great north-flowing Asiatic rivers. 

It goes without saying that where the air route 
touches the north of ISTorway or the north Pacific coast 
of Asia the problem of supply is even simpler. 

2 See map at back of this volume. 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 185 

The islands that dot the polar ocean will obviously 
become important relay stations on the various trans- 
polar routes. Of these, Spitsbergen is reachable by 
steamer at least six months every year and some sea- 
sons it is reachable the v^hole year. Ice conditions can 
be reported day by day by wireless, and freighting 
steamers will always know whether they can reach 
Spitsbergen at any given time. Reaching Eranz Josef 
Land is practicable for a somewhat shorter period each 
year, and the navigation as far as j^ovaya Zemlya does 
not now look nearly as diflBcult as it used to, for the 
sailors of the Allied countries learned a great deal 
about those routes during the latter half of the World 
War, and its imagined difficulties at least no longer 
restrain us. 

On the American side of the polar ocean Greenland 
and the Canadian islands are also far more reachable 
by ordinary steamer than is commonly imagined. 

The Gulf Stream makes the coasts of Iceland ice- 
free at all times and gives the island a winter climate 
which for all purposes of navigation may be considered 
to be the same as that of Scotland or ISTew England. 
In rare seasons the harbors of Portland, Maine, and 
Boston, Massachusetts, are frozen over and the same 
thing has occurred in certain harbors in northern Ice- 
land, although both the northern Icelandic harbors and 
those of Maine are fairly enough considered as ice-free. 

But the Gulf Stream that makes Iceland warm has an 
almost opposite effect upon Greenland, for it is respon- 
sible there for a heavy snowfall. Along the east coast 



186 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

of Greenland there is commonly sweeping a southward 
current bringing sea ice from the north and icebergs 
that have been born in the great glaciers of eastern 
Greenland itself. There is considerable uncertainty, 
therefore, about ships reaching East Greenland ports 
even in mid-summer, but these difficulties will event- 
ually be greatly lessened by a chain of wireless stations 
to give daily information for each harbor. It could 
seldom happen that all harbors of a long coast would 
be simultaneously jammed with moving ice. A few 
decades from now we shall probably have daily wireless 
bulletins showing that while such and such harbors 
are temporarily blocked, others are on those days open 
and accessible. This general removal of the element 
of chance from ice navigation by the work of the more 
perfect weather bureaus will be, next to the removal 
of fear based on ignorance, the greatest single force in 
opening up the polar regions to more and more ex- 
tensive navigation by ordinary tramp steamers. 

The west coast of Greenland is now considered to be 
and probably really is more accessible than the east 
coast, and vessels of the royal Danish trading com- 
pany go every year from station to station supplying 
the trading posts and reaching even places such as 
l^orth Star Bay and Cape York, which were formerly 
the northerly base stations of polar explorers. Baffin 
Island has for many decades been visited yearly by the 
trading ships of the Hudson's Bay Company. Cap- 
tain Henry Toke Munn has a trading station now near 
the north end of the island and reaches it whenever he 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 187 

likes with little difficulty. Ellesmere Island, to the 
north, will soon be the base of similar trading stations, 
entirely apart from any aircraft development. 

On the map, Melville Island looks exceedingly in- 
accessible but the fact is that of the many vessels that 
have tried to reach it nearly every one has succeeded, 
although they were chiefly sailing vessels of the days 
antedating steam. In more recent years steamers 
such as the Arctic, of the Canadian JSTaval Service, 
have had even less difficulty. 

Banks Island can be reached at least nineteen years 
out of twenty by the ordinary whaling and trading ves- 
sels that for the last forty years have been in the habit 
of going north from Bering Straits and east past the 
north coast of Alaska to Herschel Island and Cape 
Bathurst. Another way of reaching Banks Island is 
by river steamers down the Mackenzie and local ships 
plying northeastward from the Mackenzie's mouth. 
Herschel Island itself at the northwestern corner of 
Canada can always be relied on as a base station for 
airship supplies, as it has already been relied upon 
for four decades by the American whalers and the 
British trading companies. 

In Alaska, Point Barrow at the north tip has been 
reached by supply vessels every year during the last 
forty. Point Hope, on the northwest corner of Alaska, 
is even more accessible, while regular oceangoing pas- 
senger steamers of the type that cross the Pacific by 
the more southerly routes have for twenty years been 
plying between Seattle and l^ome on Bering Sea. 



188 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

In northeastern Siberia the conditions of accessi- 
bility are similar. Petropavlovsk is a common ren- 
dezvous of traders ; Bering Straits are navigable every 
year, and ships are able except occasionally under ex- 
traordinary conditions to pass at "will up the north 
coast as far at least as the mouth of the Kolyma. One 
hundred years ago Baron Wrangel, in Russian service 
as a polar explorer, passed down this river and found 
at its mouth an already ancient trading rendezvous. 
By spur railways from the Trans-Siberian trunk line, 
and then down the Kolyma, Lena, Yenisei and Obi, 
supplies can be sent by river steamer to be trans-shipped 
to the New Siberia Islands where for a long time the 
Russians have maintained settlements dealing in the 
furs of animals now living and the ivory of the extinct 
elephants (mammoths) . 

Thus we see that most of the islands that now dot 
the polar maps can with fair ease be reached by surface- 
going ships wanting to deposit there petroleum and 
other supplies needed for the maintenance of way sta- 
tions for aerial traffic. The newly discovered Emperor 
ISTicholas II Land, north of the north tip of Siberia, 
and the islands discovered by the Canadian expedition 
under my command during the years 1913-1918 are 
more difficult of access by ordinary ships. It appears 
to me a fair presumption that ISTicholas II Land could 
be reached by ocean freighters only every other year 
on the average, and I doubt that the islands we dis- 
covered can be reached more than one year in ten by 
surface craft. There will also be exceptional seasons 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 189 

when such islands as Wrangel cannot be reached at all 
bj tramp steamers and many of the arctic islands are 
unreachable by surface ships during at least the winter 
and spring months. It is here that the coming air 
development will find an important adjunct in the sub- 
marine. 

It has commonly been said that the submarine will 
be a commercial carrier only in time of war because 
the expense of under-water freighting is so much greater 
than that of freighting on the surface. Under con- 
ditions of peace it cannot compete with surface ships 
in ordinary waters. But it will have its usefulness 
when and where ice makes surface navigation uncer- 
tain, difficult, or impossible. 

Those who have considered the submarine only from 
the point of view of a layman, and even submarine 
experts who are unfamiliar with ice conditions, com- 
monly assume that ice on the ocean's surface would be 
a menace and even a bar to submarine navigation. In 
the opinion of those who understand both ice conditions 
and the qualities of the submarine this is so far from 
being the truth that some have gone to the extreme of 
saying that the presence of ice is to the submarine 
actually an advantage. This means that had the 
Germans in the late war had the same motive for 
sending a commercial submarine to Japan that they 
had for sending one to the United States, they could 
have done so easily and by a route recognized to be 
in length well within the cruising radius of a sub- 
marine. 



190 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

Of the two best-known American submarine in- 
ventors, Holland and Lake, Lake has devoted himself 
especially to the under-ice type. Before the World 
War the Czar's Government had paid some attention 
to his activities and extensive trials had been made 
which are fully recorded in Lake's writings on the 
commercial submarine. 

Those who suppose that the submarine would find 
great difficulty in polar waters are often led to that 
belief by direct misinformation as to conditions there. 
It is commonly supposed, for instance, that icebergs are 
found in the polar ocean. This is not a fact. In nine 
winters spent north of the arctic circle traveling much 
of the time over sea ice, Admiral Peary saw no icebergs ; 
in ten years of similar northern travel, I have seen 
none; ISTansen reports none from his extensive journeys 
to the north of Spitsbergen and Eranz Josef Land.^ 
Indeed we are reasonably certain that there are no ice- 
bergs anywhere in the ocean between Franz Josef Land 
and Spitsbergen on the European side and the main- 
land of Siberia on the opposite side of the great north- 
ern Mediterranean. If there are dangers connected 
with icebergs, such dangers will be met in the north 
Atlantic during that part of the transpolar voyage 
when the submarine is steaming along the surface 
exactly like any ocean-going ship. These would then 
be only the identical dangers which the Scotch and 

s Mr. Anthony Fiala tells me he saw some small icebergs imme- 
diately north of Franz Josef Land. He feels sure they were 
locally produced and will not be found far north of the island 
group. 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 191 

l^orwegian whalers have been meeting successfully and 
without concern for centuries, and which the tourist 
ships are now meeting every summer on the Spitsbergen 
route. In that part of the polar ocean which is sup- 
posed to be difficult, the iceberg part of the difl&culty 
is purely imaginary. 

Another worry of those who have not looked closely 
into polar conditions is that even the regular sea ice 
may project so deep into the water that it will be a 
menace to submarines. Here again my own experi- 
ence agrees exactly with that of Admiral Peary, who 
said that he had never seen a cake of ice aground in 
more than twenty fathoms. In other words, the most 
massive piling-up of ice when it is being broken by 
pressure, will never create a ridge that projects more 
than a hundred and twenty feet below the surface of 
the water. It is true from the point of view of physi- 
cists that an ice cake of symmetrical shape floats in 
fresh water something like six-sevenths submerged. 
From this people have wrongly estimated that an ice 
pressure ridge which has its highest pinnacles say 
eighty feet above the water will have its lowest pro- 
jections four or five hundred feet below the surface. 
This is not the case, because these ridges are pyramid- 
shaped, the massive base of the pyramid being under 
water and the comparatively slender apex above it. 
Submarines of to-day navigate comfortably between 
180 and 200 feet below the surface, which gives a safety 
zone of 60 to 80 feet between them and the ice above. 
Half this margin would be ample. 



192 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

The submarines are not going to collide with ice 
while submerged. Through my knowledge of polar 
conditions I have long known that the danger of this 
is negligible. But it was only in some recent dis- 
cussions with submarine friends that I learned they 
did not worry at all about under-water collisions with 
ice. I was told that the submarines now in actual use 
by the British ISTavy do not fear colliding at a speed 
of say four miles an hour with sunken wrecks of ships. 
Obviously, there would be no greater danger in col- 
liding with submerged ice. Furthermore, Simon Lake 
has invented a shock absorber for head-on contact and 
has also developed a device that makes the submarine 
almost inevitably strike a glancing blow at any ob- 
struction it meets, and rise or dive rather than come 
to an abrupt standstill with a shock. 

Popularly, the "frozen ocean" is supposed to be more 
frozen than it really is. The observations of ISTansen 
and others have shown that, by actual freezing, sea ice 
never becomes more than seven feet thick. This means 
that the average thickness in winter is much less than 
seven feet, and in summer less again. 

We have already said that ice floes are probably 
never in summer as much as fifty miles in diameter. 
Under water a submarine can for a limited time main- 
tain a speed of say ten knots, but at the much more 
economical speed of five knots a submerged journey 
of fifty miles is ordinary and one of two hundred miles 
not impossible even at the present-day stage of con- 
struction. This gives ample leeway for diving and 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 193 

passing entirely under the biggest piece of ice, coming 
up in free water on the other side. It may he ob- 
jected that, from below, it is difficult to tell before 
rising whether you are going to rise in free water or 
under an ice cake. This is true, but the consequences 
are not serious. There is no danger of injuring the 
boat by rising against ice that is above it. The rise 
can be made very slowly, and naturally under-ice boats 
will have no conning tower or other upward projection 
subject to injury. Indeed, certain boats designed by 
Simon Lake carry a sort of toboggan on their backs so 
that when they rise against the ice they can steam ahead, 
sliding along its under surface, somewhat as a fly crawls 
on a ceiling, until finally the margin of the floe shall 
be reached when the boat will bob up into the open. 
Even apart from this the boat can rise and dive, rise 
and dive, as a whale does, going down each time it 
fails and trying again a few hundred yards ahead. 

Furthermore, there are at least three ways of coming 
to the surface through ice. One would be to leave be- 
hind a depth bomb, go off to a safe distance, explode 
it, and come back to the place where the ice had been 
all broken up. A second way, for which there is a 
patented invention, is to rise against the ice and drill 
a hole upward for men to step out. This has been 
actually done through river ice in winter. A third and 
simpler way is to carry on the deck of the submarine 
an electric coil. When the boat rests against the ice 
a current could be passed through the coil heating it 
as the bread toasters are heated on our breakfast tables, 



194. THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

melting a way upward for the boat. This principle 
has for decades been in actual use in gold mining in 
such countries as Alaska, where the miners thaw their 
way down as here we would thaw our way up. The 
miners have to deal with frozen mud which is much 
more difficult to thaw than plain ice, and the problem 
of the submarine would therefore be comparatively 
simple. It is to be remembered that by sliding along 
the under surface for half a mile or so the submarine 
could almost certainly find a place where the ice would 
be less than three feet thick, for in summer three feet 
will be more than its average thickness.* 

Although I have been considering the possibility of 
polar exploration by submarines for the last four years 
(as mentioned by Admiral Peary in his speech when 
he discussed my work before the ]S[ational Geographic 
Society on January 10, 1919. See: ISTational Geo- 
graphic Magazine, for April, 1920), I was surprised 
to learn the other day that the submarines of the Allies 
have actually been using against ice the devices which 
during the war they had on their bows for cutting 
through steel nets laid by the Germans. It appears that 
in effect this is a solid steel bow, corresponding to the 
steel bows carried by whaling and other ice-fighting 
ships. With it they have already had experience to 

4 Many persons have read the proofs of this book. Most of 
the laymen have wanted me to insert here a long account of how 
all these things are done. They say people will not take much 
etock in these views otherwise. But since those submarine men 
I know who have actually operated under ice consider as common- 
place everything said here about under-ice work, I have decided 
not to expand the text on this point. 




^ 3. 
< a 

C5 CO 
CO 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 195 

the north of Archangel in charging at full speed into 
ice and they have found not only that the vessel can 
cut the ice and steam through it if it is not more than 
a foot in thickness, hut also that neither the hovp' nor 
any part undergoes injury through this buffeting. 
"When we recall that these submarines were not made 
for dealing with ice and are, nevertheless, adequate 
for doing so, it becomes evident that others designed 
for polar voyages would be even more competent if 
made for that purpose now, and still more competent in 
the future when experience shall have shown us what 
modifications to the present type are advantageous. 

The most experienced submarine man with whom I 
have so far talked was one who operated at times among 
ice to the north of Archangel during the war. He pro- 
posed a method of rising up through ice more spec- 
tacular than any that I had conceived but which 
he considered safe. The submarine he commanded 
had a bow fortified with the regular steel net cut- 
ter. His suggestion was that the boat should seek 
its greatest practical depth, say two hundred feet 
below the surface. It should then assume an angle of 
thirty to forty-five degrees and charge upward with a 
double speed attained by combining the forward thrust 
of the propeller with the acceleration obtainable by 
rapidly increasing the buoyancy of the boat so that it 
should fly upward somewhat as a cork does when re- 
leased in water. The boat would then reach the surface 
with a velocity of perhaps fifteen or twenty miles per 
hour which would give a sufficient blow to break ice 



196 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

of more than average thickness, especially in summer 
when it is moderately "rotten." 

Many have noted as Shakespeare did the fact that 
we dread unusual dangers and accept with equanimity 
those to which we are accustomed. Because each one of 
us dies but once, it would seem ahsurd that we could get 
used to dying. Still that is what it amounts to. Mil- 
lions are dying around us from tuberculosis, tens of 
thousands by cancer, and thousands by being run over 
by motor vehicles. We are so used to having people die 
from these and other well-known causes that the danger 
of our also dying in that way doesn't bother us much. It 
is perhaps an exaggeration to say that the greater the 
danger of our dying in a certain way the less we worry 
over that cause of death. An instance in that direc- 
tion is that we worry more about lightning which kills 
dozens than we do about tuberculosis which kills mil- 
lions. We are nowadays getting so used to airmen 
dashing themselves to pulp against the ground and we 
are still so strange to death by submarine accident that 
we can count on almost any one saying that he would a 
good deal rather cross the polar ocean by air than under 
water. The facts show that the danger in the air is 
greater, but still we all accept as a rapidly approaching 
condition transoceanic air travel, be the ocean the At- 
lantic, Indian, Pacific, or (now that we understand it) 
the Arctic. 

Our unaccustomed minds shrink from the far safer 
and easier submarine traverse. So as to understate 
the case greatly, we shall say that the danger of polar 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 197 

voyages in ships sucli as those of Peary or JSTansen is 
greater than that of polar voyages by submarine. Still 
further understating the ease, we can say that the 
voyages of Columbus and Magellan were made in ships 
which did not meet the dangers of the ocean's surface 
nearly so well as the submarine now meets the under- 
water dangers. If we then think back to the voyages 
by the Phoenicians north along the coast of Europe 
and to the voyages by the ISTorsemen across the Atlantic 
a thousand years ago, we shall see that the first trans- 
polar voyage by submarine will be a far safer under- 
taking than hundreds of thousands of surface voyages 
across various seas have been during the last three 
thousand years. 

The present point in discussing the adaptability of 
the submarine to under-ice voyaging is that whenever 
the air routes become of wide importance the sub- 
marine will be an auxiliary or, more particularly, a 
factor of safety in supplying the various polar islands 
with petroleum and whatever goods are needed from 
year to year. Suppose, for instance, that in a certain 
year Wrangel Island could not be reached by ordinary 
sea-going ships. The distance from [N'ome to Wrangel 
Island would be at least half of it a surface journey. 
It would require only one dive of about 250 miles, or 
several shorter dives to reach a depot at Rodgers Har- 
bor. In summer that harbor will naturally be open. 
In winter it could be kept open artificially exactly as 
such harbors in northern countries are now kept open 
for the use of ferry-boats and other craft. Even were 



198 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

there a continuous layer of ice for 200 miles around 
Wrangel Island (as there never would be), the subma- 
rine could dive at the outer margin of the ice and come 
up in the harbor thus artificially kept open. 

Freighting by submarine is far more expensive than 
that by surface ships and, as we have said above, it has 
been assumed therefore, that they would be used as 
freighters only in time of war. But if any island such 
as Wrangel is ice-bound and yet has to be reached, 
there are only two routes open — the air above the ice 
and the water under it» If the submarine is a more 
expensive freighter than the surface ship, it is at least 
far more economical than the swift airplane or dirigible, 
hence its coming value as an adjunct to them, not only 
in the actual polar regions but also in districts such 
as Hudson Bay or the Kara Sea where surface freight- 
ers can travel only half the year. 

The question of "navigation" as applied to the sub-- 
marine may seem difficult but really is not. As they 
are constituted at present, submarines that have to 
travel under water would rise every fifty or seventy- 
five miles to charge their batteries afresh. At these 
risings they could take the ordinary astronomical ob- 
servations that guide ships at sea. The practical 
sailor knows that the sounding lead is in the vicinity 
of land an even more valuable instrument than the 
sextant. Sailors go not only by the depth but also by 
the sandy or other character of the bottom sample as 
brought up by the sounding machine. Right now sub- 
marines take soundings as they travel with the same 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 199 

ease as do surface ships. They carry also gyroscopic 
and other compasses and their officers have the same 
training in making dead reckoning that do those of 
surface craft. For the vicinity of the harbors of their 
destination they would naturally carry charts showing 
very carefully the contours of the ocean bottom. In 
most places there would be channels and ridges by 
which the submarines could locate themselves to grope 
into port under water just as surface ships are now 
every day groping their way into port under blankets 
of fog. 

As said, we may estimate at five years or at fifty 
years the time when transoceanic commerce shall be 
an every day matter. There are few who think 
that time will never come. Accordingly, most of us 
will get a wider view of the commercial, political and 
military future of the world when we realize that the 
airplane, the dirigible, and the submarine are about 
to turn the polar ocean into a Mediterranean and about 
to make England and Japan, N^orway and Alaska, 
neighbors across the northern sea. 

NOTES ON TEANSPOLAB KOUTES 

As already mentioned in this book, the population 
centers of to-day are not as northerly as they will be 
within a few decades. The transpolar routes will, 
therefore, be of continually increasing importance. As 
the cereal belts of middle Canada and middle Siberia 
are increasingly cultivated, great cities will grow up. 



200 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

We have their beginning already. Thirty years ago 
Edmonton, for instance, was a village; to-day it is a 
city of 60,000 inhabitants. The oil fields of the lower 
Mackenzie where the Standard Oil Company already 
has extensive operations, and the copper district north 
of Great Bear Lake hold a definite promise of commer- 
cial centers. It may be of little beyond academic in- 
terest this year that the air route from the northern 
railway terminus on the Athabasca River north of 
Edmonton to Archangel, in northern Russia, is only 
3300 miles but over 7000 by any route now available., 
But as the railway continues to push its way northward 
through Canada this route will rapidly gain in im- 
portance. 

With the idea in mind that conditions for summer 
flying are more favorable over the polar regions than 
in most other parts of the world, the reader will see 
from the polar map at the back of this volume that the 
routes indicated thereon are but a few (and perhaps 
not the most promising) of the airways of the future. 

A disadvantage of the shortest possible route from 
England to Tokyo is that it is not sufficiently northerly 
to give the maximum amount of daylight, for it is only 
about half of the journey that lies north of the arctic 
circle. To get a greater benefit from the perpetual 
daylight of the arctic summer a route might be laid 
from Scotland to the east tip of Iceland, thence by 
way of Jan May en Island, next the summer hotel al- 
ready established in Spitsbergen, then Eranz Josef 
Land, Emperor ITicholas II Land or Cape Chelyuskin, 



TRANSPOLAR COMMERCE BY AIR 201 

and thence overland to Japan. This route is only 
slightly longer than the shortest possible route but is 
3500 miles shorter than the route to Japan from Eng- 
land by way of Montreal, and 2000 miles shorter than 
the route from England to Japan by way of the Kew 
Siberian Railway. 

The simplicity of the polar air journey from Eng- 
land to Japan appears most strikingly when we com- 
pare this route of the future with the routes of the 
past. It goes without saying that all appliances will 
be better than they have been and that there will 
be increasing perfection in technique. It is generally 
considered that when a long journey is from land to 
land over various expanses of sea the "length of hop" 
is the chief difficulty. Then take the flight of Alcock 
and Brown from ISTewfoundland to Ireland, a single 
hop of about 1800 miles, or that of Read from 'New- 
foundland to the Azores. So far as length of journey 
is concerned, the flight of the Smith brothers from 
England to Australia far exceeds the London-Tokyo 
journey. 

Those who think a large population is required be- 
fore a railway can be built into a new country will 
do well to consider the Australian railway between Bris- 
bane and Perth. Erom its eastern terminus in thickly 
settled l^ew South Wales it leaves the populous lands 
behind at Port Augusta and for a thousand miles 
thence to Calgoorlie passes through country which 
nowhere has a population as high as one person in 
sixteen square miles (according to a graph for the 



202 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

1911 Australian Census published in the "Official Year 
Book of the Commonwealth of Australia" for 1920). 
Its terminus at Perth is a town of 8,000 inhabitants. 
If you compare the known prospects of development of 
that Australian semi-arid region with the known pros- 
pects of (say) the Mackenzie basin, you will see that 
men of enterprise similar to the Australians would not 
balk at building a railway the shorter distance from the 
present railhead at McMurray to the oil district near 
!N^orman. Dawson, almost on the arctic circle, had a 
population in its heyday that exceeded Perth five to one. 
Such another city may spring up any day in arctic Can- 
ada or Siberia to give new importance to the transpolar 
air routes. 

Whoever has any grasp at all of the great natural 
resources of the polar regions and of the conditions 
under which they are about to be developed, will have 
fascinating dreams about any number of other trans- 
polar routes destined to come into common use when- 
ever air travel itself becomes a commonplace in the 
more dangerous but already speculatively accepted 
routes between Liverpool and New York, San Fran- 
cisco and Hawaii and Japan. 



CHAPTER VIII 
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 

In estimating loj years or decades how soon the de- 
velopment of the Far North -will come we can give 
weight to two classes of facts, specific and general: 
the first are instances of railway building, the con- 
struction of river steamers, the formation of stock com- 
panics, the establishment of trading stations, and other 
concrete things done in the Far North or with definite 
relation to it. This book is not a reference manual 
and we shall ignore this class of facts after merely 
pointing out that the number of them is great and that 
information about them is obtainable from railway 
companies, immigration authorities of such countries 
as Canada, chambers of commerce of such cities as 
Seattle, etc. The tourist agencies will give you data 
about summer hotels and sanatoria that are already 
located beyond the arctic circle, as, for instance, in 
■Spitsbergen, three hundred miles farther north than 
the north tip of the mainland of either Canada or 
Alaska. 

We shall here give our attention solely to general 
considerations. 

In this book we have said again and again that the 

main obstacle to the development of the North is 

ignorance, or rather positive misknowledge — ^the belief 

203 



204^ THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

in difficulties that do not exist. In that the present 
situation of the North is analogous to the case of the 
prairies of the western United States and Canada a 
century ago. 

When North America was colonized from Europe 
the settlers came from districts of woods and hills and 
mountains. Most of Europe is that kind of country. 
These immigrants were familiar with methods of deal- 
ing with hills and woods and mountains. They knew 
how the rapid rivers could he harnessed to industry. 
Their ancestors had broken their backs for generations 
clearing forests and tilling rocky fields, and this they 
were prepared to continue doing. Sea commerce wag 
already well developed in Europe and river commerce 
to a less extent, and so they understood how to make 
distant lands tributary to the port of Boston and how 
to use as highways the St. Lawrence and the Missis- 
sippi. 

But in addition to understanding the lands of forest 
and hill and river, they actually supposed a hilly and 
forested land to be not merely the ideal country but 
almost the only country that was fit for habitation by 
men and women of their kind. The treeless plains they 
did not understand at all and supposed them to be es- 
sentially inferior through their mere lack of trees. 
Accordingly, the westward moving settlements followed 
the rivers, not merely because they were highways of 
travel, but also because their valleys were forested, and 
tentacles of settlements stretched out in every direc- 
tion^ leaving between vast islands of treeless prairie, 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 205 

as, for instance, in Illinois.^ Other prairies of a vaster 
scale the settlers crossed and re-crossed going from one 
forested area to another, never settling in the open for 
the simple reason that trees were not found there. 

Then of a sudden it davmed on the pioneers that the 
absence of trees instead of being a disadvantage is an 
actual advantage. Those who had gone to the forested 
sections of, say, Michigan, had spent years in hard labor 
before they could cultivate a ten or twenty-acre field. 
But on the prairie a farmer could arrive in a covered 
wagon in the early spring, with his wife beside him 
on the front seat and back of them a plow and a bag 
or two of gTain. He could stop almost anywhere, pitch 
a tent if he did not have time to build a more perma- 
nent shelter, put the plow in the ground, and in fewer 
days than it took years in Michigan he could have a 
ten or twenty-acre plowed field to be seeded that sea- 
son and to give him a crop in a hundred days. When 
that realization suddenly came upon the pioneers, the 
prairies were flooded in a decade by settlers. Erom 
this resulted the fact, so well known in all western 
districts where prairie and forests alternate, that the 
descendants of the earliest settlers have inherited the 



1 In discussing the colonization of Illinois, Barrows says : "The 
prairies were generally shunned by the first-comers for several 
reasons : ( 1 ) absence of trees was thought to mean that they 
were infertile, ... ( 5 ) to the farmer the prairies . . . constituted 
a new and altogether unknown problem. Men were for a time 
helpless before this problem, and the prairies were generally re- 
garded as 'uninhabitable.' ... As late as 1836 the few who 
thought the prairies capable of occupation were regarded as crazy 
visionaries." (Harlan H. Barrows, "Geography of the Middle 
Illinois Valley," 1910.) 



206 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

comparatively worthless forest lands, while the richest 
farms have come down to the children of those who 
came later and were forced to homestead the prairie, 
either because the woodland was gone, or else because 
they belonged to a later and more enlightened genera- 
tion that knew enough to prefer the treeless lands. 

With the conservatism of our race, many of us still 
hold in theory if not in practice the idea that a farmer 
is unfortunate who is distant from a forest, an atti- 
tude defensible upon esthetic rather than economic 
grounds and commonly amusing to those who have 
been born and brought up on the prairie. 

When I was a boy my father was helping develop 
a prairie state under land laws made by forest dwellers 
and promulgated from Washington. Congress, among 
its other benevolent visions, had the dream of rapidly 
covering the prairie states with clumps of forest, and 
the land laws were shaped to that end. A settler re- 
ceived 160 acres from the Government in return for 
living on the land. This was known as the homestead. 
He had the right to buy 160 acres of land adjoining 
for (as I remember it) $320. This was known as 
his pre-emption. Then he had the further right of 
acquiring 160 acres by planting ten acres of trees. 
This was the tree claim. Many of our neighbors made 
use of both their pre-emption and tree claim rights. 
It was common knowledge in our neighborhood that 
cottonwoods could be planted with less trouble than 
any other tree and so we all planted cottonwoods. Not 
one farmer in ten paid any attention to how they grew 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 207 

after being planted, for it seemed that one's right to 
the claim, if not in law at least in fact, could be main- 
tained through the mere planting without any success 
necessarily following. In a few places there grew up 
solid ten-acre clumps of trees, in others there would be 
straggling trees over a ten-acre patch, and in some you 
could scarcely speak of trees at all. When the neces- 
sary time had elapsed the farmers received full title 
to their tree claims from the Government, whereupon in 
more than half the cases they chopped down and 
burned up whatever trees might be standing and 
plowed the ten acres back into wheat. 

In more recent years trees have been planted to a 
considerable extent in states like North Dakota but 
largely because doing so became the fashion ; they were 
looked upon as ornaments, as flowers might be. As a 
shelter from blizzards they were by no means an un- 
mixed good. I think that most farmers brought up 
in the woods preferred to have a small clump of trees 
around their farms, but the men who were the products 
of the real prairie preferred, at least from the point 
of view of blizzards, to have their houses standing in 
the open, for the little advantage of tree shelter was 
more than canceled by the great nuisance of having 
huge banks of snow piling up in the lee of the trees, 
burying the farmer's house, which if built in an open 
place, would have stood fairly clear of snow. 

The idea of the inevitable advantage of trees still 
persists widely. The first question asked about arctic 
lands commonly is: "How far north do trees grow?" 



208 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

The feeling behind the query is that the farther north 
the trees go the better the chance must be for "ultimate 
development. This might be so if we expected to 
market the trees themselves, but I have heard of no 
student of subarctic Siberia or Canada who maintains 
that the jackpine and black spruce forests of those lands 
will serve any but auxiliary purposes — they may even- 
tually furnish fuel, shelter from storms, and building 
materials to people who make their living by some other 
means than lumbering. It might be conceivable that 
a forested farm would be better than a prairie farm 
for certain crops after the forest is cleared — ^but it 
would have to be considerably superior in soil (or some 
other important attribute) to pay for the labor of clear- 
ing. But we think of the iNorth as a pasture land, 
and especially pasture for reindeer and ovibos. A 
deerman if set down in the subarctic forest would in- 
quire his way out to the northern (not southern!) 
prairie. 

For reasons now well understood, the sons of the 
pioneers of fertile eastern and middle Ontario have 
passed through forested western Ontario to settle and 
almost crowd the treeless flats of Manitoba. For rea- 
sons analogous though different, men will pass north 
through the forests of middle Canada, or will outflank 
them by one route or another, to settle as ranchmen the 
arctic prairies. 

The uncovering of mineral wealth causes cities to 
spring up anywhere. Apart from such fortunate acci- 
dents (and apart from some new commercial develop- 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 209 

ment of the future the very nature of which we cannot 
guess) such forested, rocky hills and sand stretches as 
make up a considerable part of western Ontario and 
of central Canada will he for some time to come islands 
of sparse or no development surrounded by the seas of 
the colonized southern cereal and northern grazing 
prairies. 

It is in reality the great good fortune of the North, 
therefore, that most of it is prairie land, although we 
cannot capitalize that advantage without an educa- 
tional campaign showing that the northern prairies are 
more valuable than the northern woods, just as the 
prairies of Illinois were more easily tamed and have 
proved on the average more productive than the farm- 
lands of Michigan reclaimed from the forest. Of that 
campaign this book is a part in that we have indicated 
how the northern prairies are about to become pastures 
of vast herds of domestic animals producing meat and 
wool and hides and the various other by-products of that 
sort of development. Settlements are now striving 
northward along the rivers, colonists are appearing here 
and there along the seaboard, mines are known to exist 
and oil wells have been bored. 

When people discovered that forests were not inevi- 
tably associated with fertile land, as they did after 
they had passed the forest barrier of the eastern part 
of the United States and Canada, they then sought the 
prairie lands in a very direct and eager manner. Men 
from the eastern states or provinces crossed through 
the forest belt on trains and landed in the midst of 



210 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

the prairie. Thus men have already learned to cross 
entire climatic or forest zones in order to get into the 
more favorable lands beyond. With progress and edu- 
cation and the rapid spread of knowledge we no longer 
need to wait for a generation of experience to teach 
us where to go in order to find new economic oppor- 
tunities. The prairies of the Far I^Torth would be en- 
tered by an ignorant and unintelligent people by work- 
ing only from the border lands on the south where 
settlement was already established. An intelligent and 
progressive people, aware of the undeveloped oppor- 
tunities of the northern prairies, should be able to study 
the situation, arrive from a distance at a conclusion 
as to their usefulness, and immediately penetrate and 
occupy in many different places any large land of 
promise. 

It may still be possible to argue that it would have 
been wiser to develop to the full the cattle and wheat 
possibilities of Georgia, Vermont, and Ontario before 
leaping to the distant productiveness of Texas, 
]^ebraska, and Alberta. But the few who could be 
convinced by such arguments would nevertheless admit 
that with the history of the nineteenth century open 
before us we cannot doubt that the pioneers of the 
twentieth century will cross or outflank the stubborn 
scrub forests of central Canada on their northward 
march just as the earlier pioneers crossed or avoided 
western Ontario on their way to the wheat prairies. 
They will do so if the northern prairies like the western 
hold out to them the promise of an easier livelihood. 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 211 

The sudden development of the ISTorth (correspond- 
ing to the development of the Mid- west prairies) will 
come when we at length realize that the very qualities 
which we had supposed to be its worst drawbacks are 
really advantages once their true meaning is under- 
stood. 

It is commonly supposed to be a disadvantage of the 
ITorth that the subsoil is frozen. The absurdity of this 
appears as soon as you think about it. Even the city- 
bred have commonly enough heard that a clayey subsoil 
underlying surface loam makes the ideal condition for 
most kinds of cropping. The virtue of the clay is not 
so much in the nutriment it furnishes to the plants that 
grow in the soil above but more in that it retains water 
and brings it back by capillarity near the surface. In 
temperate and tropic regions much of the land is so 
porous that a heavy shower dampens it only for a matter 
of days and the water sinks down beyond the reach of 
the longest roots, and plants die for lack of moisture 
in places where the weather bureau reports a rainfall 
that would be abundant if only there were a clay layer 
not too far below. But if the clay in southern countries 
is only in patches, the frozen subsoil of the Far ISTorth 
is universal. In some cases it may be several feet dovsn, 
in other places and in other circumstances only a few 
inches. This frozen subsoil prevents loss of water by 
drainage and acts as a reservoir from which water 
comes during periods of droughts when the soil warms 
up to greater depths and makes the frozen water avail- 
able. This is one of the reasons why no part of the 



212 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

world is so safe from drought as the Far ]^orth, even 
though the precipitation is light when measured in 
inches. 

How different from a drawback the frozen subsoil 
may he is indicated by a recent conversation with Dr. 
Alfred H. Brooks, the head of the United States Geo- 
logical Survey for Alaska. He was showing me a photo- 
graph where Dr. Charles C. Georgeson had secured a 
fabulous stand of wheat on ground where the frost was 
only a foot or so down. This picture dated back a 
good many years. Dr. Brooks said that each year of 
cultivation has forced this permanently frozen layer 
farther and farther down until there now are some 
fifteen or twenty feet of thawed ground where once 
there were not that many inches. 

To explain the retreat of the frost is simple. For- 
merly the ground was covered in spring with a damp 
layer of dead vegetation from last year. This had upon 
the soil somewhat the protective effect that a layer of 
damp sawdust has upon ice. Furthermore, the color 
of the surface was whitish and there may have been 
some bushes or trees to give shade. When the plow 
turned the soil it exposed a black surface where pre- 
viously it had been whitish, and it is well known that 
the sun's rays generate the maximum of heat when they 
strike anything dark. The shade of bushes or trees was 
now removed and also the protection of the layer of 
damp, dead vegetation. As a result the heat penetrated 
deeper, incidentally drying the soil. It takes less heat 
to raise the temperature of a cubic foot of dry soil than 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 213 

that of a cubic foot of damp soil, so here we have an- 
other factor to increase the depth of thawing. A com- 
hination of these and other conditions has gradually 
compelled the frost to withdraw deeper into the ground 
until now the cold of winter is no longer sufficient to 
freeze the surface down into contact with the original 
frost. There is thus even at the end of winter an un- 
frozen layer between the temporary surface frost and 
the "permanent" ground frost. 

If ground frost were a handicap its disappearance 
would be an occasion for rejoicing. But the interesting 
and disquieting thought is that (as stated elsewhere in 
this volume) the subarctic regions generally have very 
light rainfall. Although this is sufficient for the native 
vegetation (the dead part of which acts as a wet saw- 
dust covering to preserve the underground frost), it 
may not be sufficient for cultivated crops. Whether the 
Yukon valley or portions of it will turn through the 
thawing of the ground into a region semi-arid in the 
sense that the rainfall is insufficient for crops, Dr. 
Georgeson does not yet know but Dr. Brooks thought 
he was beginning to worry about it. 

I have just been reading Conan Doyle's latest book, 
as I always read his books. I did not expect to find 
in it anything pertinent to my argument but I did find 
so striking a passage that I doubt if a search through 
all our literature, whether "scientific" or descriptive, 
would serve us better.^ 

2 "The Wanderings of a Spiritiialist," by Sir Arthur Conan 
Doyle, pp. 64, 65, 66. 



214 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

"In Adelaide I appreciated, for the first time, the crisis 
which Australia has been passing through in the shape of a 
two-years' drought, only recently broken. It seems to have 
involved all the States and to have caused great losses, amount- 
ing to millions of sheep and cattle. The result was that the 
price of those cattle which survived has risen enormously, and 
at the time of our visit an absolute record had been established^ 
a bullock having been sold for £41. The normal price would 
be about £13. Sheep were about £3 each, the normal being 
fifteen shillings. This had, of course, sent the price of meat 
soaring with the usual popular unrest and agitation as a result. 
It was clear, however, that with the heavy rains the prices 
would fall. These Australian droughts are reaUy terrible 
things, especially when they come upon newly-opened country 
and in the hotter regions of Queensland and the North. One 
lady told us that she had endured a drought in Queensland 
which lasted so long that children of five had never seen a drop 
of rain. You could travel a hundred miles and find the brown 
earth the whole way, with no sign of green anywhere, the sheep 
eating twigs or gnawing bark until they died. . . . 

"But to return for a moment to the droughts; has any 
writer of fiction invented or described a more long-drawn agony 
than that of the man, his nerves the more tired and sensitive 
from the constant unbroken heat, waiting day after day for 
the cloud that never comes, while under the glaring sun from 
the unchanging blue above him, his sheep, which represent all 
his life's work and his hopes, perish before his eyes? A 
revolver shot has often ended the long vigil and the pioneer 
has joined his vanished flocks. ..." 



It is only casual thinkers who suppose that cold is 
on our earth the greatest enemy to vegetation. The 
greatest enemy is drought. It is not only the sheep 
lands of Australia and the cattle lands of South Africa 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 215 

that suffer. From Arizona to Alberta tens of thou- 
sands of cattle have died during the last three or four 
years, if not directly from thirst, at least from hunger 
brought on by lack of vegetation "which in turn was 
due to lack of water. The losses would have been 
many times as heavy but for the fact that some owners 
butchered their herds, selling the meat at a sacrifice, 
and others shipped them out to districts better supplied 
with rain, or imported hay half across the continent 
to keep their beasts alive. 

As this book is being prepared for the press famines 
as terrible as any in history are sweeping over vast 
areas of Europe and Asia. The leading figure of the 
Russian relief is Fridtjof Nansen. Presumably few 
know the causes of the famine there better than he. 
He is known to be anti-Bolshevik but he does not put 
the main blame on Bolshevism ; he opposed the blockade 
of Russia and has denounced the fomenting of civil 
wars in Russia, but he gives these only as secondary 
causes of the famine. The main, cause, he says, was 
a two years' drought which alone was so serious that 
help on a vast scale from the outside world would 
have been necessary even had political and industrial 
conditions been favorable in Russia. 

In only limited areas of other zones can we feel 
sure that the rain will be neither too scarce or abun- 
dant any year. In the Arctic, at least this serious draw- 
back is absent. 

In most parts of the United States and southern 
Canada we have large-scale cattle raising only in dis- 



216 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

tricts that are used for stock because the rainfall ig 
not adequate for cereal crops and because irrigation ia 
impossible or has not as yet been developed. The 
greatest danger in this stock raising in the semi-arid 
■districts is that for a year or for a cycle of years you 
may have desert conditions temporarily prevailing, so 
ihat a range which adequately supports ten thousand 
head one year may prove insufficient for a thousand 
iead two years later. That condition will never pre- 
vail in any of the polar lands. Without going tedi- 
ously into the theory which makes it plain why this is 
so, we can rest here at merely saying that no one has 
ever observed in the polar regions that the vegetation 
varies appreciably from year to year through abun- 
dance or lack of rain or snow. The grazing experts 
of the United States Biological Survey have concluded 
that in northwestern Alaska a square mile of land will 
support from twenty-five to thirty reindeer perma- 
nently. A similar estimate if made for Arizona would 
have to embody the qualification that this applies to 
ordinary years only. In the ISTorth every year is an 
ordinary year, and a range that supports twenty-five 
head to the square mile one year will support twenty- 
five head forever, if the soil is not mistreated through 
trampling by driving vast herds over it or through tem- 
porarily being over-grazed by fifty or a hundred head 
being placed on an area calculated to support only 
twenty-five. 

In this chapter, which considers the factors that for 
the present tend to hold back the development of the 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 21T 

North, we may admit again what has been implied 
ahove, that a good deal of the ISTorth is covered with 
scrub forest. In some quarters, as around Great Bear 
Lake, vast areas are covered. This will be a drawback 
there just as a scrub forest incaanj parts of the United 
States and southern Canada is a drawback. But when 
narrow strips of forest are thrust far out into the arctic 
prairie along river valleys, the disadvantage is counter- 
balanced by benefits of another sort. People coming 
from the South and unfamiliar with northern prairie 
conditions, will eagerly seek these forest strips as loca- 
tion for their ranchhouses. There is also some advan- 
tage to gardening from the nearness of trees. Further, 
it is an undoubted convenience to have firewood avail- 
able. These advantages of the forest belts along the 
northern rivers will, in my opinion, about offset the 
disadvantage of having to subtract their area from the 
grand total of the available grazing lands. 

The lack of transportation facilities in the ]^orth is 
a disadvantage inherent in its newness. Railways and 
the like will develop as the settlements develop and the 
problem here is nowise different from the problems that 
have already been solved by the railway builders of 
more southerly portions of North America. 

From the point of view of boat transportation, it is 
a disadvantage that in the North the rivers are frozen 
over for several months each year. The Mackenzie 
between Great Slave Lake and the polar sea is, for 
instance, open only from about the middle of May to 
the middle of November, and a period somewhat 



218 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

shorter for its delta. Similar conditions prevail in 
Siberia and in Alaska. 

But this difficulty is for the present more than 
counterbalanced by the ease of overland transportation 
in winter. In colonizing southern countries it is found 
that while lakes and rivers are highways for boats they 
are obstructions to overland travel. In the winter each 
northern river becomes a highway for sledges and so 
does every lake. The same country that would be im- 
passable for tractors^ for instance, during the summer 
months, will in the Far ISTorth be easily crossable in 
winter. It is not unlikely that the truck and the cater- 
pillar tractor will in consequence find in the polar 
regions one of their main fields of usefulness. 

On summer journeys the Indians and Eskimos com- 
monly go by boat across a lake to a place that is known 
to be a narrow neck or portage to another lake. Thus, 
by carrying canoes and freight over the portages, long 
journeys are made from lake to lake and river to river. 
In winter these and similar routes are used for sledge 
travel. The dog team crosses a lake, goes over a por- 
tage and crosses another lake. For heavy freighting 
the same principle can be applied to tractors. Every 
lake will be a ready-made road. When you come to 
the neck of land that separates one lake from another, 
you may have land which in the summer is a swamp 
where men would sink to their knees in mud and horses 
to their bellies. In winter everything will be found 
solid, and if only trees that happen to be on the portage 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 219 

are chopped away flush with the ground, you have with- 
out any further building a fairly level and exceedingly 
hard tractor road. 

In considering the possibility of this mode of freight- 
ing in winter, it is to be emphasized again that snow- 
fall in polar and subpolar lands is nearly everywhere 
exceedingly light, a fact that simplifies greatly the 
winter freighting problem. In the fish industry on 
Lake Winnipeg, for instance, tractors and trucks are 
now in extensive winter use. They will be even more 
valuable for lakes farther north both because of the 
slightly increasing length of winter and because of the 
continually decreasing snowfall. 

It is thought by some that the absence of the sun 
during a part of the year will be a serious handicap to 
northern development. True, for outdoor work it is 
highly desirable that the sun should be shining. But 
even as it is, mines in every latitude use artificial light 
at aU times of day and night and the same is true of 
many of the factories and most of the business offices 
in our great cities. Certain kinds of work are, there- 
fore, now carried on by artificial light at all times in 
every latitude. 

Eor travel daylight is generally advantageous. It 
is, however, well known that automobile travel can be 
satisfactorily conducted at night. I have found that 
drivers on such fairly dangerous roads as the ISTavajo 
Trail, for instance, or indeed anywhere in mountains, 
commonly prefer to drive at night, for the light of a 



220 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

vehicle coming around a curve gives you an earlier 
warning than the actual appearance of it would in day- 
light. 

The people who now live in the ISTorth commonly 
look forward eagerly to the period of darkness, not 
because they like the darkness itself, but because the 
mid-winter is the vacation time. This is especially 
true of the Eskimos but is to a less degree true of the 
whites as well. In southerly latitudes we look forward 
to August, not because we like the heat as such, but 
rather because the extreme heat lessens our ability to 
work and so makes it the accepted vacation time. Eor 
an analogous reason mid-winter is the accepted vacation 
lime of the IvTorth. 

It will always be possible to argue^ even after the 
^orth has been colonized, that the distribution of day- 
light and darkness is more advantageous in the tropics 
or in the temperate zones. I think it likely that a vote 
taken in any place will always show a heavy majority 
in favor of that distribution of day and night which is 
found in that place. Dwellers in the tropics will feel 
it more convenient that the day and night should be 
of approximately equal length throughout the year; 
dwellers in the polar regions will probably think it 
more desirable that there shall be perpetual daylight 
during the seasons of greatest productive activity. 
They will say that they would like to have daylight 
the year round, but, if half the year has to be daylight 
and half dark, they prefer the distribution found 
.around the arctic circle to that found farther south. 




Tractor Drawing a Traix of Sledges ix Alaska. 







'Jl 














*1k^ 










utik 




Jl^~ 










i 














ftfa»li|MWfeT V '^ ' 






- 




iJ 


■*'~ .^ '••.SBirtMBHBlM^^^m 








^SH 


^^ 


1 






Hi} 


fflT-'^S 


E'^H 


Kyi»>VTl|^p|^^^B| 



The Mackenzie just >South of the Arctic Circle. 
The northern rivers are highways for boats in summer and 
highways for tractors and sledges in winter. 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 221 

Such at least has been my feeling and that of many 
of our men. Since the northern winter is the time 
of idleness anyway, you might as well have the dark- 
ness concentrated there. When the ]Srorth becomes 
really civilized, with movie houses on every corner, we 
shall find modern ways of passing the winter that are 
as satisfactory to us as the singing and dancing and 
visiting are to the Eskimos. 

We now come to more serious handicaps to rapid 
development: our fashionable houses and our fashion- 
able clothes. 

The great disadvantage of the ordinary European 
or American house when employed as a northern dwell- 
ing is the character of the door. It is well known that 
warm air is light and cold air is heavy. When at low 
winter temperatures you use doors that are seven or 
eight feet high and three or four feet across, you are 
opening a communication of that size between the out- 
door air and that of the house, which differ in tem- 
perature by say one hundred degrees (perhaps from 
30 below zero outdoors to 70° above indoors). The 
gravitational difference in the heavy outer and the light 
inner air results in an inrush of cold along the floor 
and an outrush of heat through the upper half of the 
door. You can scarcely open and close a door so 
quickly that you do not appreciably lower the tem- 
perature of the interior of the house. 

The solution of this problem is exceedingly simple. 
In cold countries you should live in houses that have 
the ground floor devoted to a store room. You could 



222 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

enter this ground floor through a door of the ordinary 
type, then proceed upstairs by means of steps. In 
many of our cities there are flights of from six to a 
dozen steps leading up to the doors of fashionable 
houses, and one would think that it would be 
easy to get people living in a cold climate to consent 
to walk up a flight of steps inside a house similar 
to the one which they so cheerfully mount outside. 
The fact remains that neither in Dawson nor ISTome 
nor Winnipeg nor any cold city known to me has 
this sensible method as yet been employed and I am not 
at all sanguine that it will soon be employed. Fashions 
do not seem to be developed through any process of con- 
scious reasoning. They are accordingly difficult to alter 
through motives of mere convenience or common 
sense. 

The problem of shutting out the cold by having dou- 
ble or triple windows has already been satisfactorily 
solved. Apart from a few such modifications, in the 
countries now inhabited that have minimum winter 
temperatures similar to those of the polar regions (the 
Dakotas, Manitoba, Russia, etc.), we mitigate the worst 
effects of the thoughtless designing of our buildings by 
a heavy consumption of fuel. This for the time being 
may be considered a practical solution and will tide 
us over until common sense shall become more powerful 
than fashion in the designing of our dwellings. 

We do not have to invent, but can borrow from the 
Eskimos, a system of winter clothing that comes 
nearer perfection than most human devices. There 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 223 

are many styles adapted to modifying conditions. Of 
these I shall describe but one. 

First you have a complete suit of light reindeer 
underwear, the fur in from mittens to socks. You 
may think this would be ticklish or would have other 
undesirable features, but on trial it would soon become 
your favorite underwear for midwinter. If you know 
how good a sealskin collar feels against your cheek, 
you know how such underwear feels all over. It would 
be uncomfortable indoors at typical American house 
temperatures, but would be about right in Scotland or 
France. Over this you would wear boots, outer coat 
and mittens all of fur and all to be removed or ex- 
changed for lighter ones on coming into a house. You 
would wear cloth outer trousers which need not neces- 
sarily be changed for lighter ones on coming indoors. 
This is about what we are used to in removing at the 
door rubbers, overcoat, mittens and cap. If you did 
not expect to go out again you could change to lighter 
house garments — ^which would not be any more trouble 
than you now have dressing for dinner. 

The sort of complete suit just described need not 
weigh more than ten pounds — ^no more than the average 
man's winter business suit. It is as soft as chamois 
leather and so nearly cold-proof that you would be 
much more comfortable in it at fifty below zero than 
you now are in woolen underwear, tweed suit and light 
overcoat at twenty above zero. 

If, then, we dress in a common sense way, we can 
be as comfortable outdoors in an arctic winter as we 



224 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

now are in the winter climates of almost any of the 
"temperate" lands. 

But it is a far look ahead to the time when common 
sense shall su]3ersede fashion in the designing of our 
clothes. ^0 matter how poor we are and no matter how 
silly the fashions are, we discard our clothes or make 
them over year by year to correspond to the mode in 
Paris or in London. How wasteful this practice is and 
what a millstone it is about our economic necks we aE 
realize. However, we get along somehow here in the 
South. Even in cities like Minneapolis and Winnipeg 
we worry through the winters, the women- in diaphanous 
dresses and the men in oxfords and stiff hats. Btit 
the handicap becomes greater as you go north, for the 
winter does become longer though it be not appre- 
ciably colder. Enthusiast that I am about the ISTorth 
and delighting as I do in the brisk and stimulating 
air of winter, I always have to admit that I abominate 
spending the mid-winter in a city. I have to dress 
according to fashion, with a result that I suffer more 
from cold in the two or three cold months of ISTew York 
than I do in the six or seven cold months of Banks 
or Melville Island. 

The increasing popularity of winter sports in Swit- 
zerland and such American winter resorts as Lake 
Placid or Algonquin Park shows a clear trend towards 
the fashionableness of winter. Advertising and skilful 
propaganda will swing the tourist currents now south 
and now north, but there will probably in the long run 
be a division, the old and lethargic going prevailingly 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 225 

south, the young in years and the young in spirit going 
prevailingly north. I cannot see the ITorth as a loafing 
place nor as a place for resting, if by rest you mean 
inactivity or languid movement. But if by rest you 
mean a refreshening through strenuous play that will 
enable you to return with stored-up energy to the hard 
work of the city after a week or a month of vacation, 
then there is already ample testimony to show that Lake 
Placid and Switzerland have much in their favor as 
against Florida or the Riviera. 

But it must be noticed that northern sports every- 
where pre-suppose a new way of dressing. These cold 
weather fashions may be intrinsically as attractive as 
you please but they maintain themselves with difficulty 
sporadically and locally, for they do not fall into the 
general currents of fashion as predetermined in France 
and England. 

In Montreal and Ottawa boys and girls dressed for 
skating and skiing are happy as the day is long, while 
their parents in European fashions complain much of 
the discomforts they suffer in their hasty excursions 
to their offices and their afternoon teas. Sensible dress 
in such cities merely palliates the rigors of winter, for 
it is so seldom worn, but it at least points the way. 
Until people of all ages and all occupations begin to 
dress as sensibly for the cold as do the skaters and 
skiiers of cold countries, there will be much discomfort 
connected with living in the I^orth. 

Having considered the handicaps to northern devel- 
opment that relate to the winter cold, we come now to 



226 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

those that relate to the excessive summer heat and to 
its corollaries. 

Heat as heat will not keep back the development of 
the North any more than it has kept back the develop- 
ment of the tropics or the temperate lands. Plainly 
there will be some suffering during the period when 
the temperature ranges between 85° and 100° in the 
shade, for prevailingly the North is humid and the 
heat will therefore have its fullest disagreeableness. 
Also we lack in the North the brief respite of the 
night's darkness. It has seemed to me in Arizona that 
the 110 in the shade was, even at noon, palliated by 
the approaching coolness of the night. You do not feel 
really hot if you know that you will soon be cool. At 
places such as the Coppermine River in Canada you 
would have to have a vivid imagination to be able to 
get much comfort in the swelter of 95° in the shade 
by remembering that inside of six weeks the sun would 
begin to set and the nights begin to be cool. 

But in certain ways we can deal with the heat bet- 
ter in the North than we can in the South. The sum- 
mer of 1918 when it got so hot in the hospital at Port 
Yukon that many of us moved down into the cellar, 
we had a cool cellar to move into because the ground 
underneath was frozen. Almost anywhere in the North 
you could have a sort of cyclone cellar where you could 
descend into the frozen ground for temporary relief, 
somewhat as they burrow into the ground to flee the 
tornadoes in Iowa and Nebraska. 

In most southern places you can get relief from the 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 227 

lieat bj dressing lightly. At present this is not an 
available avenue of escape in most northern lands be- 
cause of the plague of mosquitoes. 'No matter how 
hot you are, you will have to wear thick enough cloth- 
ing so they cannot sting through, with unpierceable 
gloves on your hands and a veil over your face. There 
was a time when many southern places now comfort- 
able in summer were intolerable through the number 
of mosquitoes. Settlements will in general mitigate 
the insect pests of any land. However, we look upon 
the immediate development of the ISTorth as consisting 
mainly in great stock ranches where a few people will 
be all that are needed to look after thousands of ani- 
mals and tens or hundreds of square miles of grazing 
land. This type of colonization, requiring no cultiva- 
tion of the land and little drainage, will not handicap 
the mosquitoes appreciably. We shall, therefore, have 
to discover some new means of dealing with the insect 
pests before we can seek relief from the heat up there 
by light clothing. 

Although the mosquito is the worst single insect of 
the North, the sandflies and horseflies are also to be 
reckoned with. Some say the sandflies are worse than 
the mosquitoes because they will get inside of your 
clothes and crawl all over you. This can be dealt with 
by wearing knitted cotton or woolen underwear that 
grips the body so tightly that flies cannot crawl under. 
That is a simple enough way theoretically but one 
does not like to be clothed that way when the tempera- 
ture is around 90°. I always feel that the sandflies 



228 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

are second to the mosquito for they come late in the 
summer when the nights are beginning to be cool and, 
whatever annoyance they give in daylight, they at least 
let you alone during the cool and dark hours. 

The horseflies, or as they are usually called, moose 
flies or bull dogs, are not any worse in the Ear !North 
than they are in many settled countries. 

The difficulty with the perpetual daylight of sum- 
mer has always been no less imaginary than the diffi- 
culty with the darkness of winter. Being imaginary, 
this difficulty will have to be dealt with only by the 
early colonists of the ISTorth who come into the region 
believing in its existence. The belief, with its attend- 
ant ill effects, will die out in a year or two. Even- 
tually a tourist who fears the perpetual daylight will 
get on his nerves will become in the ISTorth as much 
of a joke as the Englishman used to be a few years ago 
in Montreal who stepped ashore armed to the teeth 
against desperadoes and Indians. 

With all the people who find difficulty in getting up 
in the morning in time to catch the suburban train to 
their offices and with all the fashionables who sleep 
till noon, it ought to be a matter of common knowledge 
that daylight does not interfere with sleep. Still, I 
have heard of people in Alaska and the Yukon who 
have worried themselves into a state of nerves by their 
fear of inability to sleep in daylight. This fear has 
created the real inability to sleep, which in turn has 
had its effect upon the disposition and even the health 
of the person concerned. This is a psychological con- 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 229 

dition from which many people have suffered during 
the last two or three decades in connection with the 
Alaska and Yukon gold rushes, hut which has already 
passed its crest. When first I went jSTorth (1906) I 
heard a great deal of talk about this difficulty in sleep- 
ing. In spite of careful inquiry, I have heard very 
little of it the last few years. 



We who are trying to abolish the Arctic are well 
aware of the difficulty of the task. 'No one can be 
familiar with similar enterprises of the past without 
realizing that in its class this is the most difficult. 
Take, for instance, the slow decline and fall of the 
Great American Desert. That was an idea which ran 
its full course within a single century and, therefore, 
never had the vitality of the polar myth which has 
come down to us through milleniums of unshaken be- 
lief. For the purposes of the illuminating analogy, I 
had commenced a study of the Great American Desert 
when there came to my attention an admirable summary, 
written by Floyd C. Shoemaker, "Traditions Concern- 
ing the Missouri Question," an address delivered at 
the general session of the American Historical Asso- 
ciation in St. Louis, December 29, 1921.^ His account 
in part is as follows : 

"For forty years 'The Great American Desert' includecl 
what is to-day one-half of the world's greatest granary — the 

3 "The Missouri Historical Review," January, 1922. 



230 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

Mississippi Valley. Considering the relatively accurate knowl- 
edge of the trade routes of this region possessed by traders, 
trappers and explorers, and considering even the relatively 
accurate knowledge of this region possessed by scientists and 
observing travelers, it is surprising that 'The Great Americaa 
Desert' persisted decade after decade, a barrier to settlements, 
a refuge for savages, and an all too handy term of derision 
by foreign writers and statesmen to discourage emigration to 
western United States. In reading the literature of that day 
descriptive of this section, it seems that the Government re- 
ports educated the adult population and the school text-books 
educated the growing generation to recognize the fact that 
America could rival Africa in possessing a Sahara." 

". . . To Zebulon M. Pike, a native of New Jersey, the West 
is largely indebted for . . . the mirage-barrier of 'The Great 
American Desert.' This New Jersey-Pennsylvanian did more 
through his report of 1810 to the War Office to retard settle- 
ment of the trans-Mississippi country than all the Indiaa 
tribes of the plains. His report contains such descriptions 
and comments as this: 'From these immense prairies may be 
derived great advantage to the United States, viz. : the re- 
striction of our population to some certain limits and thereby 
a continuation of the Union. Our citizens being so prone to 
rambling and extending themselves on the frontier, will, by 
necessity, be constrained to limit their extent to the West to 
the borders of the Missouri and the Mississippi, while they 
leave the prairies, incapable of cultivation, to the wandering 
and uncivilized Aborigines of the country.' Here was an 
official report, based on two explorations, on the country north 
and west of Missouri. Pike had done more than explore the 
sources of the Mississippi and discover the peak which bears 
his name. He had discovered a desert that equalled the Sa- 
hara. In geographies and literature both in America and in 
foreign countries, 'The Great American Desert' was now to 
receive unstinted publicity. 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 231 

"The next nation-wide advertisement of this district was 
again gratuitously written by a government official. To Major 
Stephen H. Long, a native of New Hampshire, a graduate of 
Dartmouth, and an officer in the United States Army, is the 
West indebted for the vivid colorkigs of 'The Great American 
Desert.' His great exploration of 1819-20, set forth in his 
repoi't to the Secretary of War, is important ... in picturing 
the West beyond Missouri as uninhabitable. He described the 
country between the Mississippi and the Missouri in these 
words: 'Large tracts are often to be met with, exhibiting 
scarcely a trace of vegetation.' Of the mountain region he 
wrote: 'It is a region destined by the barrenness of its soil, 
the inhospitable character of its climate and by other physical 
disadvantages to be the abode of perpetual desolation.' In 
conclusion he says: 'From the minute account given in the 
narrative of the expedition of the bad features of the region, 
it will be perceived to bear a manifest resemblance to the 
deserts of Siberia.' 

"As government documents Pike's and Long's reports were 
widely circulated and generally accepted. They furnished the 
data for statesmen, historians and geographers. The school 
geography of Woodbridge and Willard of 1824 thus describes 
the present Nebraska district: 'The predominant soil of this 
region is sterile sand.' Later geographies used in the schools 
contained similar descriptions. Iowa and Minnesota were 
eliminated only as they were settled. The most graphic and 
damaging picture of the 'American Desert' came from the pen 
of America's novelist, Washington Irving, when his Astoria 
appeared in 1836." 

About the middle of the 19th century the power of 
the Great American Desert began perceptibly to wane 
and by 1867 only western Kansas remained of the 
fictitious desert — and of course the small patches of 



232 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

real desert that remain to this daj and are only 
gradually and partially being conquered by irrigation. 
It is a commonplace now that much of the Great Ameri- 
can Desert is the best natural farming land in the 
world, and parts of it have been selling for agricultural 
purposes during the last few years for as high as 
five hundred dollars an acre. 

If one disregards the greater antiquity of the 
'Trozen Wilderness of the Ear IsTorth," Dr. Shoe- 
maker's account furnishes in other respects a striking 
parallel. The Great American Desert rested upon the 
accounts of travelers, admired in their time and so 
charitably treated by posterity that their names will 
not disappear from our histories for centuries, if ever. 
We reluctantly admit that their judgment as to the 
habitability of the country they explored was not sound, 
but somehow that does not seem to detract very much 
from our general admiration for them nor to lower 
their historical position. Erom this analogy we may 
take comfort, for history will doubtless manage simi- 
larly still to rank high the explorers of our Frozen 
ISTorth even after we realize that it is not half so frozen 
as they reported it to be and even after cities are built 
in the regions which they thought would be forever 
desert. 

It is striking to note in Dr. Shoemaker's summary 
the parallel between the Government reports that fur- 
nished the chief bulwark of the Great American Desert, 
and the Government reports which still sustain the 
Frozen Wilderness of the ITorth. Then, as now, the 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 233 

school books followed the reports of Government and 
private explorers, and the knowledge of the fertility of 
the Middle West existed for decades side by side with 
the text-books and encyclopedias which denied it. So 
it is now, and the slow battle has to be fought over again. 
'No one realizes that better than the author of this book 
and the friends who have encouraged him to publish it. 
We have no thought of abolishing the Great Arctic 
Desert with one book or in one short campaign. The 
best we hope is to focus public attention upon the case 
and to provoke discussion and investigation that shall 
not end until this myth goes the way of the many similar 
myths of early days that have retarded progress each 
in its own time. 

Most of the Great American Desert has vanished 
because most of it never existed. What did exist we 
are conquering, in part at least, by irrigation and dry 
farming. Where minerals have been found great cities 
now stand in patches of otherwise unconquered desert. 
A similar destiny awaits the Frozen Desert of the Far 
!N'orth. Much of it will disappear through the mere ad- 
vance of knowledge. The rest the ingenuity of man 
will conquer, here partially and there completely. In 
some sections now most forbidding we shall find un- 
dreamt values. The creative minds and guiding hands 
of the future will turn many of the forces we now 
dread to precious use. 

When looked at with the perspective of a century 
to our advantage, it seems a curious thing that Pike 
could consider the Great American Desert a blessing 



234 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

in that it prevented people from going west of the 
Mississippi, thus indirectly (he thought) favoring the 
development of the eastern half of the United States. 
It is hard for us to see how people of that time could 
have been so short-sighted. But it is somewhat easier 
(because we have the advocates now with us) to under- 
stand why many of the colonists of southern Alaska 
resent the development of the reindeer prairies that 
form the northern third of that territory, and why many 
in Ontario think that the prairies that make up the 
northern third of Canada should await for their devel- 
opment the time when the scrub-covered and rock-in- 
fested hills farther south have been laboriously brought 
under the plow. The interest in such views, how- 
ever, must always remain academic, for in the history 
of the development of the western hemisphere their 
advocates have never yet prevailed. l!^either will simi- 
lar views, should they be held in Russia or Siberia, 
keep back more than temporarily the development of 
that great country, even though sterner measures may 
possibly there be taken than any that are congenial to 
!North American political institutions. 



There is a fundamental difference between coloniza- 
tion from east to west and colonization from south to 
north. East resembles west more closely than north 
resembles south and the psychological difficulties of 
northern colonization are, therefore, greater. 

A part of Illinois was colonized from Louisiana and 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 235 

Mississippi. With southern minds, the colonists were 
naturally inclined to southern ways and southern crops. 
So they tried to cultivate cotton in Illinois. The results 
were difficulties that might have fallen little short of 
disaster had not other colonists been there from the 
east with eastern ideas and eastern crops, the success 
of which won over the southerners from cotton to corn. 
These eastern colonists were the great good fortune of 
Illinois, for, although their minds were intrinsically 
no better than the minds of the southerners, they did 
not have to undergo a fundamental change before they 
became useful in Illinois. 

In certain parts of Dakota we had difficulties anal- 
ogous to those of Illinois. Just as the southerners tried 
to plant cotton north of the Ohio so did the immigrants 
from Illinois and Iowa try to plant corn in North 
Dakota. Broken in fortune and broken-hearted, many 
of these colonists returned to the corn lands with tales 
of the inhospitality of the Dakota prairie, and cattle 
ranches spread over the abortive corn fields. When my 
family moved out to establish a cattle ranch on the pub- 
lic domain, we camped near an abandoned plowed field. 
Judging by the condition of the ground, I imagine the 
original homesteader had left it six or eight years be- 
fore. Although it was fifteen or twenty miles to our 
nearest neighbor at that time, the country had been 
dotted with homesteads a few years earlier. 

But North Dakota had colonists from Ontario as 
well as from Illinois ; just as Illinois had colonists from 
Pennsylvania as well as Mississippi. In the main, it 



236 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

was these northerners that revived the fortunes of Da- 
kota and brought the tide of immigration hack again, 
so that after a decade or two of abandonment the 
prairie farms were re-homesteaded, this time by a suc- 
cessful people because they were not trying to gather 
grapes from thorns. They were not cultivating cotton 
or corn, but wheat. 

As we go north the problem of colonization becomes 
steadily more difficult. Fully half of Europe can give 
us colonists that are fitted through their bringing up 
for the development of Illinois. ISForth-Europeans can 
adapt themselves without violent mental wrenches to 
southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. But none of the 
European countries which have so far given any ap- 
preciable number of colonists to ITorth America is fitted 
by climate to send us immigrants who in northern 
Canada can commence without apprenticeship the de- 
velopment of the land. The southern cotton growers 
in Illinois had neighbors from whom to learn better. 
The colonists of the Yukon or of Great Bear Lake 
must either be of such a high level of intelligence as 
to think out their problems before they actually meet 
them, or else they have to go through the painful ex- 
perience of learning by failure. But history shows 
that the colonist will not ordinarily learn by failure; 
instead he returns disheartened to the cotton lands and 
the corn fields. 

We are frequently asked to-day why it is that Alaska 
has a smaller population now than it had twenty years 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 237 

ago or even ten years ago. There are various narrow 
answers, such as the effect of ^'hard times" in the United 
States, and the drop in the purchasing power of gold. 
But the broad answer is: southerners have gone there 
and have tried to live as southerners. They have in 
general failed. A few have learned wisdom, have be- 
come northerners and have stayed; but the majority 
have returned to lands where they could live as their 
fathers had lived before them. 

To those who suppose that similar latitudes in the 
old and new worlds necessarily have similar climates 
and similar resources, it seems reasonable to suppose 
also that IN'orwegians, for instance, would take to the 
iNorth as ducks do to water. The fact is that Nor- 
wegians are not through their experience any better 
adapted to real polar countries than the natives of 
Ontario or Michigan. The climate of North Dakota 
gives a much closer parallel. The immigrant from 
Dakota would find near the arctic circle in Canada 
or Siberia many conditions to which he is used — the 
hot summers, the cold winters, and the treeless plains. 
He might, therefore, approve the scenery and find the 
climate tolerable. But he would try to cultivate cereals, 
build barns and milk cows. Thus he would be as 
unfit for the North as the cotton planters were for 
Illinois. It is true that the northern summer and 
winter resemble in heat and cold the same seasons in 
many of the ordinary lands, but the difference in length 
of season is enough so that nothing but failure can 



238 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

result from any colonizing scheme where the plan is 
to develop the animals and the crops to which the 
colonists are used. 

Here, then, we have a profoundly serious difficulty 
to overcome in the colonization of the l^orth. But the 
difficulty is psychological and can be dealt with by edu- 
cation. It is hard to educate large masses of people, 
but fairly easy to convince a few individuals, especially 
when these are men of pioneer minds. !Now it happens 
that many of the large industries of the world and 
much of the world's capital is in the hands of just such 
men. If rapid development of the ISTorth is desired, 
the logical way is to convince a few "captains of in- 
dustry" and to induce the governments concerned to 
give these leaders a fair opportunity. If a thousand 
small landholders go north, a thousand men have to 
be educated to meet the new conditions. But if a 
thousand go there as employees of a corporation, they 
will work under the direction of foremen who do 
much of their thinking for them. This will remove 
the "psychological" factor from the case (or at least 
lessen its effect). An ordinary colony may fail through 
the conservatism of its members, but a commercial en- 
terprise on a large scale will succeed unless the resources 
of the land have been over-estimated, or unless the plan 
deliberately intended to meet the new conditions in 
reality fails to meet them. 

Before closing, we have to consider a fundamental 
weakness in all the arguments of this book. We have 




A Burning Coal Mine, near Parry Peninsula, 200 Miles 
North of Arctic Circle. 




Flowing Oil Well on the Mackenzie River between Fort 
Norman and the Arctic Circle. 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 239 

assumed in general that tlie northern frontier will be 
crossed and the northern lands colonized because the 
same factors will still take men I^orth as once took 
them West. The weakness of the argument may be 
that our people are no longer the same and will not 
be led far afield by the motives that lured their ances- 
tors. All over our "civilized" world is seen a tendency 
of the land folk to crowd into the cities. Tenement 
houses not remote from theatres are increasingly be- 
coming the general ideal. This is a condition which 
Jtias aroused alarm in many quarters. It is said that 
we are becoming a weakened and softened nation, not 
only because the frontier is not here any longer to 
struggle with, but also because we shrink increas- 
ingly from any sort of active struggle with JSTature 
that takes us beyond the reach of our various new and 
elaborate appliances for coddling ourselves. 

This argument would have seemed a little stronger 
before the War than it does now. It was found then 
that both in the camps before the soldiers went to the 
front and later in active service, the milksops from the 
cities not only turned into surprisingly sturdy men 
but proved to be surprisingly fond of the active life 
when once they had been forcibly thrust into it. How- 
ever, it unquestionably took force to thrust them into 
it and, as no force can conceivably be applied in send- 
ing men to the new frontier, it may well be that those 
who actually would like the ITorth if they ever tried 
it can never be induced to go and try. 

We have argued elsewhere that the development of 



240 THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF EMPIRE 

a northern frontier will he more rapid than was the 
development of the western, because everything now- 
adays moves more rapidly. When the need is once 
realized, railways are more quickly built than they 
were fifty years ago. Air navigation is an easy way 
of opening new places, for no matter what the inequali- 
ties of the surface, no matter what of swamps or rocks, 
the air above is substantially the same and the topo- 
graphy is of importance from the point of view of air 
development only in so far as it allows or prevents 
safe landings. It happens that in the Far ITorth we 
have lakes scattered everywhere. There is no part of 
the world which has so many small lakes. These will 
always form good landing places for flying boats in 
summer and for airplanes equipped with skids in win- 
ter. The natural limitations of aircraft as freight 
carriers will lessen but not cancel their value in north- 
ern development. 

It is probable that Daniel Boone in the Kentucky 
forest reconciled himself easily to the thought that 
he might not hear more than once a year what Congress 
was doing at Washington. Our different generation 
may worry if they go far beyond the frontier lest they 
miss their newspapers for several days. From the 
point of view of these the radio and the airplane 
will be consoling thoughts. 

While we recognize that the general modern tend- 
ency towards city life and the lessened percentage 
among us of those who enjoy activity in the open air 
will inhibit somewhat the development of the northern 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 241 

frontier, we still feel tliat the other compensating 
factors will operate to such an extent that the ISTorth 
will soon come into its own and will be developed as 
rapidly at least as the West was by our perhaps hardier 
and more adventurous progenitors. 

Whatever the general effeminacy of our time may 
be, we do still have among us a considerable number 
of men of the Roosevelt type. There are growing up 
here and there boys of the Daniel Boone and David 
Crockett type with an inborn passion for the frontier. 
Each giant task that develops along the trail of such 
pioneers will find at the appropriate time its Cecil 
Rhodes, its Jim Hill or Strathcona. 

It is great good fortune that we still have our 
frontier land in which pioneers may struggle and 
build, where they may dream their dreams of empire, 
and eventually write upon pages now blank the story 
of those realized dreams. 



POSTSCEIPT 

It took forty years of residence in the northern 
hemisphere, twenty years of the study of history, an- 
thropology and geography, and ten years of residence 
in the polar regions to open my eyes to the considera- 
tions which this book has attempted to present, I hand 
it over to the public disheartened by a realization of the 
faults of the book and aware of the ease with which 
hackneyed tricks of controversy will be employed 
against it. 

It is a commonplace with sociologists that nothing is 
so utterly unpleasant as that which is wholly new. The 
ideas of this book are new enough to be unpleasant 
to the "conservative." From this source alone there 
is sure to be a good deal of opposition. It is easy 
to foresee that further opposition will come from many 
sources. But, foreseeing opposition, we are not attempt- 
ing to meet all of it. That could not be done without 
making the book voluminous and tedious. 

In a talk recently given at the iJ^aval War College, 
Dr. Isaiah Bowman said: 

"Until a new idea succeeds, it can always be logically 
demonstrated that the idea is either wrong or unsound ; 
for back of the old ideas and the old ways lie experi- 
ences which are interwoven with the judgments of men ; 
and this advantage is denied the new idea. A classic 

243 



244* POSTSCRIPT 

example is the case of Agassiz when he saw the moranic 
drift about Boston. He said : 'If this were in Switzer- 
land I should think the ice had been here.' Everybody 
laughed! How absurd (at that time) to suppose that 
the ice could be there when there were no mountains !" ^ 

"When a novel view is not dismissed offhand as being 
absurd, the usual method of controverting it is to mis- 
quote it sufficiently to make it seem even newer (or 
more absurd), and then to ridicule or disprove it as 
misquoted. This in its nature is impossible to guard 
against. 

With a book against which there are many prepos- 
sessions, the method of confutation by misquotation 
need not be used. It is almost as effective to take single 
arguments apart from their context. A structure built 
to lean against another structure is not necessarily able 
to stand alone. 

In some cases the critic can appeal with confidence 
to public misinformation. In days when the earth was 
believed to be flat, a reference to its roundness sounded 
as ridiculous as a reference to its flatness would sound 
to-day. 

A priori, one would think that ability to change one's 
opinion was a sign of mental power. It is instead a 
gift, or a grace. There are minds at once powerful 
and stationary — they can always see a new point, but 
they always find a method of explaining it away so 



lis there any deeper damnation of an opinion than a clear 
demonstration that it is new? Cf. the New England expression: 
"Who ever heard of such a thing?" 



POSTSCRIPT 245 

as to avoid dianging their previous opinions. Such 
men have already said about some of the essays that 
have gone to make up this book that they are ex- 
amples of very clever special pleading. These men do 
me too much honor. It takes great ability to present 
a bad case well, and only a little to present the truth 
convincingly. But when you know a thing you cannot 
easily avoid seeming a special pleader to those who 
either cannot or will not see. In his day the arguments 
of Copernicus were looked upon as exceedingly clever 
(in fact, devilishly clever) examples of special plead- 
ing. But the world was and is round, and his special 
pleading is now called clear exposition. 

Many say that I am prejudiced in favor of the 
North because I have lived there too long. Here again 
we have a rather fundamental difficulty. Had I lived 
in the North little enough to retain my prejudice against 
it, I should never have had the ideas which this book 
tries to express. Knowledge is so apt to prejudice one. 
That is why we have so much trouble finding in an era 
of general education men ignorant enough to serve on 
our important jury trials. To-day it would be almost 
impossible to find a jury ignorant enough to give the 
prosecution a fair chance to burn Bruno. Certainly 
you could never have picked from Magellan's shipmates 
an impartial jury to try Copernicus for heresy. 

But out of forebodings such as these there has come 
a cheering thought. If it took half a century to de- 
pose a pretender like the Great American Desert, we 
cannot expect to compel with one book, or with a dozen, 



246 POSTSCRIPT 

the abdication of the Frozen Wilderness of the Far 
ISTorth, legitimately descended as it is from centuries 
of myth and marvel. What we do reasonably hope 
(not I alone but the many who consider the subject 
of first importance) is that we may start debates and 
discussions and investigations that shall not end till 
men's ideas of the ITorth correspond as nearly with the 
facts as our present ideas of the Great American Desert 
correspond with our mental pictures of Utah and of 
Kansas. 

Since our motive is not to prove the case now, but 
rather to start a discussion that shall prove it eventu- 
ally, some at least of the apparent defects of this book 
may prove to be among its real merits. If our state- 
ment of a point falls short of being convincing, some 
one may challenge it loudly. Thereupon another who 
sees the truth even through our faulty exposition (or 
who knew the truth before) will arise to the defense' 
of the controverted statement. Thus, he may start the 
very controversies and create the public interest we 
desire. The first consideration is to keep the public 
from forgetting that there is an issue. In this age 
of an overcrowded world, no one who knows there is 
an issue here can remain careless of its settlement, for 
upon it hangs the great value or utter worthlessness 
of lands equal in area to the whole continent of !N^orth 
America. 

There is thus a special reason why this book is not 
heavily buttressed with the footnotes that are considered 
the signs and the strength of scholarship. We are not 



POSTSCRIPT 247 

exactly setting traps; but there is no motive to fore- 
stall with references to learned works the possibility 
of some critic rushing into print with a denial of a 
statement, or an ill-considered rebuttal of a theory. 
The more of such the merrier. 



APPENDIX 

WHY THE ERRONEOUS IDEAS PERSIST i 
Traditional Ideas of the Polar Regions 

''The Polar Regions" is in one sense a term in geography; 
in another sense it is even now a term in folklore, and once 
upon a time that aspect was far more important than it is 
to-day. We cannot study the origin of the ideas about the 
polar regions, for this doubtless lies in prehistoric times. Our 
earliest histories show us the ideas definite in form although 
almost wholly erroneous in content. It is probable that few 
people to-day have a clearer idea of the polar regions than 
did, for instance, the Romans and the Greeks. What those 
ideas were we shall not consider in detail, merely summing 
them up as a group of mental pictures of an area lying be- 
yond the sheltering mountains of southern Europe filled with 
definite terrors more or less directly allied with cold and dark- 
ness. To people of subtropical lands the very idea of water 
in a solid state, as ice or snow, was gruesome. To those 
accustomed to a succession of days and nights that varied 
only slightly in length from season to season, the thought of 
short days and long nights in winter was dreadful, and that 
of weeks or months without sunlight the depth of horror. 

As civilization advanced northward the northern regions of 
flarkness and desolation were gradually shifted farther and 

iThis more technical discussion, originally published in the 
Geographical Review of the American Geographical Society for 
April, 1922, will be found to overlap in small part the discus- 
sion of the earlier chapters of this book. We put it here as an 
appendix rather than to destroy its unity by dismembering the 
original argmnent and scattering its fragments among the earlier 
chapters where (in a sense) they belong. 

249 



250 APPENDIX 

farther north. But the process was slow: the generally ac- 
cepted idea lagged behind the acquisition of scientific facts. 
The "farthest north" of Pytheas was discredited by Strabo, 
who placed the boundarj'^ of the habitable world just north 
of Britain. And of the Roman conception of the possible 
northward extension of civilization we have a well-known 
presentation in the gloomy picture of Germany drawn by 
Tacitus. When the heritage of classical learning passed to 
the Arab scholars of the Middle Ages, they readily adopted 
the idea of the dark and frozen north. It was still the general 
belief of the Mediterranean peoples. In the thirteenth cen- 
tury we find Robertus Anglicus protesting in Montpellier 
against the geographers who ascribe to England "an unin- 
habitable climate." ^ 

Even to-day parts of Norway that are in reality no colder 
at Christmas time than Massachusetts or Switzerland, are 
likely to be pictured by even university men as the very out- 
posts of desolation. This is not directly through a misunder- 
standing of the facts of geography and meteorology but is 
rather a survival, in spite of correctly apprehended scientific 
principles, of ancient inherited opinions about the terrors of 
the Frozen North. 



Present-Day Misconceptions of the Arctic 

To-day the average intelligent person who is not a geogra- 
pher or a meteorologist is likely to have the following ideas 
about the Arctic : 

1. In general, it is dreadfully cold there at all times of the 
year; in particular, the minimum temperatures of winter are 
everywhere lower than they are anywhere in lands occupied by 
an agricultural population. In summer the greatest heat is 
not sufficient to make the days comfortably warm. 

2 Pierre Duiem: "Le syst&me du monde," 5 vols., Paris, 1913-17; 
reference in Vol. Ill, p. 292. 



APPENDIX 251 

2. The arctic lands are nearly everywhere devoid of vege- 
tation. If there is any vegetation, it is mosses and lichens. 
A few people who are not geographers have heard that there 
are flowers in the polar regions, some even know that there 
are carpets of flowers; but this idea is prevented from be- 
coming very enlightening by the assumption that these are 
all "lowly," "hardy," or "stunted" plants. 

3. The Arctic is, generally speaking, devoid of animal 
life. In some places there are polar bears and seals, but 
neither of these animals nor any other is found in the water 
or on the iee when you get into "the remote polar regions" 
at great distances from land. 

4. A certain mystical idea about the polar regions is re- 
sponsible for a group of notions as follows: (a) that there is 
a peculiar deathlike stillness at most or all times; (6) that 
the polar night has a dreadfully depressing effect on the 
human spirit, but that (c) there is a certain fascination about 
the North which either in spite of its terrors or even because 
of them entices men of a peculiarly heroic mold into these 
dreadful regions, there to suffer and if need be to die in the 
cause of science. 

We have perhaps not made this picture complete, but, so 
far as we have drawn it, it will be found substantially correct. 



Noises of the So-Called "Silent North" 

A curious instance of how an inherited idea can fail to be 
corrected through repeated observation is found in "the eter- 
nal silence" of the North. It seems likely to me that had Sir 
Clements Markham lived to see the publication of his last 
book, it would not have appeared as it did under the title, 
"The Lands of Silence." Still, it is significant that a book 
under that title should have been published in 1921 after cen- 
turies of polar exploration and as a summary of what is known 
about the Far North and Far South. 



252 APPENDIX 

"We know from the fact that Sir Clements Markham had 
himself been in the North and also from his own writings that 
he was familiar with the great variety of summer animal life. 
A hundred species and more of birds nest largely or almost 
entirely north of the arctic circle. There are millions of caek- 
Irng geese and squawking ducks and tens of thousands of 
cranes and swans and loons. Except for the noise made by 
our machinery rather than by ourselves, and except for pos- 
sibly one or two beasts of the tropics, there is nothing in all 
creation more noisy than the loon; and no one who has ever 
heard their ghoulish shrieks and their maniacal laughter can 
think of any place infested with them as being noiseless. But 
in the North we have, in addition to them and in addition 
to the birds mentioned, more than a hundred varieties of 
other birds, each making its own peculiar noise. And then 
there are the insects. The buzz of the mosquito cannot be 
said to be particularly loud, but it certainly is a noise that 
attracts the attention of any one who happens to be about. 

These are the noises of the summer, and there are also the 
whistle of the spermophile, the sharp bark of the fox, and 
the long howl of the wolf. In the winter the birds are gone 
with their noise except for the unobtrusive cackle of the 
ptarmigan and the occasional croak of a raven. Some owls 
also are there, but they are never noisy. The foxes bark occa- 
sionally, as they do in summer, and through the starlit night 
there resounds afar the howl of the wolf (wolves are found in 
most of the arctic lands), either singly or in chorus. But even 
were they and all other animals absent, the winter would be 
by no means silent. If you are inland, about the only loud 
noises are the whistle of the wind and the resonant cracking 
of the ground when it splits and splits again under the in- 
fluence of expansion and contraction with changing tempera- 
ture. But few explorers have spent their winters inland; 
rather have they been on the coast lines or in some cases out 
at sea. 



APPENDIX 253 

The book dealing with polar regions that was published in 
England immediately preceding Markham's "Lands of Silence" 
was Shaekleton's "South," from which we quote : ^ 

July 25. Very heavy pressure about the ship. During the 
early '^hours a large field on the port quarter came charging 
up, and on meeting our floe tossed up a ridge from ten to 
fifteen feet high. The blocks of ice as they broke off crum- 
bled and piled over each other to the accompaniment of a 
thunderous roar. ... 

August 4. For nine days we have had southerly winds, and 
the last four we have experienced howling blizzards. I am 
sick of the sound of the infernal wind. Din! Din! Din! and 
darkness. . . . 

Of similar import is a quotation from my own book, "The 
Friendly Arctic": 

Two characteristic noises of southern lands are absenc. 
There is not the rustle of leaves nor the roar of traffic. Nor 
is there the beating of waves upon a shore except in summer. 
But none of these sounds are heard upon the more southerly 
prairies. The treeless plains of Dakota when I was a boy 
were far more silent than ever the Arctic has been in my 
experience . . . near the sea at least there is, not always but 
on occasion, a continuous and to those in exposed situations 
a terrifying noise. When the ice is being piled against a polar 
coast there is a high-pitched screeching as one cake slides over 
the other, like the thousand-times magnified creaking of a 
rusty hinge. There is the crashing when cakes as big as a 
church wall, after being tilted on edge, finally pass beyond 
their equilibrium and topple down upon the ice; and when, 
extensive floes, perhaps six or more feet in thickness, gradually 
bend under the resistless pressure of the pack until they buckle 
up and snap, there is a groaning as of supergiants in torment 
and a booming which at a distance of a mile or two sounds 
like a cannonade.* 

sSir Ernest Shackleton: "South," New York, 1920, p. 325. 
4 Vilhjalmur Stefansson : "The Friendly Arctic : The Story of 
Five Years in Polar Regions," New York, 1921, p. 19. 



254s APPENDIX 



Summer Heat in the "Frigid" Zone 

That the persistence of the idea that the arctic regions are 
everywhere extremely cold at all times of year is not due to 
any misapprehension of geographic or meteorological laws, is 
clear, for every textbook on geography lays down the prin- 
ciples from which we could deduce the fact that many parts 
of the polar regions cannot be as cold as certain other in- 
habited and "civilized" parts of the northern hemisphere and 
that the arctic summer in certain places must be extremely 
hot. The weather bureaus of all northerly countries furnish 
facts to bear out these geographic principles. Yet most per- 
sons remain oblivious to them. 

Psychologically there is another aspect to this case. The 
mind has a passion for simplicity. From the economic point 
of view there is still another angle. We are in need of every 
labor-saving device. To say that the tropics are always hot, 
the "temperate" regions neither hot nor cold, and the polar 
regions always cold, satisfies the mind's craving for simplicity 
and saves the time of the teacher, who gets an idea into the 
minds of his pupils with very little effort. The only trouble 
is that the idea is not correct — for any of the zones. The 
error of this simplified idea regarding the two former zones 
has been well put by Mark Jefferson, "What a suggestion of 
burning heat has the phrase 'torrid zone' and how unwar- 
ranted ! And how pleasing is the name 'temperate' applied to 
our own zone ! ... so intemperate in fact that the only sound 
description of it that applies at all times is that every season 
is exceptional." ^ 

The textbooks tell us that the amount of solar heat received 
at any point on the earth's surface depends on the angle at 
which the sun's rays fall and the length of day and, further- 

5 Mark Jefferson : The Real Temperatures Throughout North 
and South America, Geogr. Rev., Vol. VI, 1918, pp. 240-267; 
reference on p. 240. 



APPENDIX 255 

more, that the rapid increase of length of day toward the pole 
during summer more than compensates for the decreased angle 
at which the sun's rays strike the earth. Hence at midsummer 
more heat per square mile is received within the polar regions 
than at the equator.^ 

This comes into flat conflict with all our inherited views as 
to the nature of the polar regions, although it explains satis- 
factorily such figures as those given by the United States 
Weather Bureau for the summer temperature of Fort Yukon, 
Alaska, four miles north of the arctic circle, where, according 
to the Bureau, a temperature of 100° F. in the shade was 
recorded in June, 1915. Nor are high temperatures unusual. 
Dr. Cleveland Abbe gives 90° as the summer maximum in the 
Yukon valley, and, while he questions certain extremely high 
temperatures (112° or over) that have been reported, he says, 
*'That it grows very hot in this province [Alaskan interior] 
no one may deny." ^ The average temperature of the warmest 
month at Fort Macpherson, 65 miles within the arctic circle 
in Canada, is 58° F., only 1° less than that of San Francisco 
(59°)^ The mean maximum is 80°. 

GsEAT Variety of Temperatuke Conditions in the Arctic 

But it is not conservatism alone and the volume of inherited 
misinformation that have enabled the idea to prevail that the 
North is always cold. Different parts of the Arctic have very 
different temperatures. There are certain parts which never 
become very warm in summer, and, as it happens, some of 
the most widely known regions are included in them because 

6 This refers to values at the upper limit of the earth's atmos- 
phere; but, even allowing for the loss of heat in transmission 
through the atmosphere, the ratio is high — according to Angot, 
494 for the North Pole to 517 for the equator at the summer 
solstice. 

7 Cleveland Abbe, Jr. : Climate, in "The Geography and Geology 
of Alaska," by A. H. Brooks, U. 8. Geol. Survey Professional 
Paper No. 45, 1906, pp. 133-200; reference on p. 155. 



256 APPENDIX 

they have been convenient to traders and travelers and have 
been, largely through what might be called accidental reasons, 
the base stations of many well-known polar expeditions. 

Take, for instance, Greenland with its historical connections 
with Europe and its present-day interest as a Danish colony. 
The island is a mass of high mountains which store up "cold" 
in the form of the weU-known ice cap and locally refrigerate 
the air so that there are only a few places in Greenland where 
it ever gets uncomfortably warm in summer.^ 

Another storehouse of cold is the polar ocean which saves 
up enough chill from the long months of winter to neutralize 
locally a good deal of the summer heat. North of the arctic 
circle, it is only where you get far away from ice-covered 
mountains and far away from the ocean, in such places as the 
northern plains of North America or Asia, that you get the 
intense summer heat which no one expects who holds the his- 
toric view about the Arctic but which every one expects who 
understands the principles of climatology. 



An" Instance of the Retarding Influence of TRADmON 
IN THE Development op Our Prairies 

The lands that are the seat of our recent high civilization 
are mainly forest-covered except where the forests have been 
cleared away. Our people are accustomed to the idea that in 
order to be desirable a land must be forested. This erroneous 
view kept back the development of the fi'ontiers of the United 
States, even as far south as Illinois, until the comparatively 
infertile lands around had been colonized. Only about half 
the history of the United States as a nation has passed since 
people came to realize that a land may be desirable though it 
be treeless. It was even more recently that our mid-western 
farmers saw that the absence of trees is an advantage, enabling 

8 According to Hann, Angmagsalik (65°37'N.) has a mean 
July temperature of 43° and an extreme temperature of 66°. 



APPENDIX 257 

tiiem to cultivate at little expense lands more productive on 
the average than the fields reclaimed by decades of labor from 
originally forest clad areas, such as those of Massachusetts 
or Wisconsin. 

In going west from the Atlantic seaboard, the colonists did 
not expect to find undesirable land and were surprised and 
grieved when the prairie lay before them. Those who have 
gone north from either Europe or America, prepared to arrive 
at a region of desolation, found only the desolation they ex- 
pected when the northern prairies lay before them, and 
wherever they went they filled their narratives with such ad- 
jectives as "barren" and "desolate." But, although they per- 
haps intended to indicate by those adjectives little beyond the 
mere absence of trees, they have conveyed a gloomier meaning 
to the stay-at-homes who read the books. 

Illustrations of Tradition in Current Descriptions 
OF Alaska 

An added reason why we find it so difficult to get correct 
ideas about the North is that even the writers who are trying 
to explain to us the friendliness and fruitfulness of the Arctic 
are handicapped in doing so by the molds in which their child- 
hood thought has been east. A good example of that is a 
recent article in the Review of Reviews. This is a magazine 
of the higher type. Furthermore, the author of the article 
evidently intends to be specifically truthful. The whole tenor 
of what he writes contradicts his opening sentence, which is as 
follows: "A new chapter in the story of the international 
search for oil is now being unfolded in the frozen wilderness 
of the far North." ^ By the words "the frozen wilderness of 
the far North," he obviously does not mean to convey the idea 
that the country is particularly frozen. To him this is merely 
a formula to describe the North and does not mean that the 

9 J. W. Smallwood : Oil in the Frozen North, Amer. Rev. of 
Reviews, Vol LXIII, 1921, pp. 639-644; reference on p. 639. 



258 APPENDIX 

North is frozen any more than calling Michigan the "Wol- 
verine State" implies that the most outstanding feature of 
that state is the omnipresence of wolverines. We see thi3 
clearly when we follow the article on towards its end, where 
we find the following: "The Imperial Oil drillers were fur- 
nished with vegetable seeds when they went north and re- 
quested to observe closely the results of their planting. They 
found that peas planted early in June were ripe on July 23. 
By the end of July potatoes were ready to eat and the grass 
V^as three feet high. The soil is a rich black loam. Some day 
this country may serve as a great agricultural district." ^° 
This, then, is the very district to which he refers as the "frozen 
wilderness of the far North." 

Another good example is "A Cheechako in Alaska and 
Yukon," by Charlotte Cameron. Mrs. Cameron also intends 
to be truthful, and scattered throughout her book are rap- 
turous exclamations over the marvelous flowers and fruits and 
vegetables which she found growing nearly everywhere she 
went in Alaska. I have checked up the route by which she 
traveled and have found that it must have been seldom that 
she came near enough to any of the high mountains of Alaska 
to see a snow-capped peak. She then means nothing beyond 
the use of what to her is a formula or a name for the North 
when she says in the "Afterthoughts" to her book: 

Was this journey of 20,000 miles really worth while? The 
hardships, the inconveniences, the rebuffs, were they worth 
it all? 

Of a surety ! This long, long jaunt to the Arctic snows has 
brought me face to face with a race of men and women whom 
one is proud to own as kin — the pioneers, the men who blaze 
the trail, the men who, God willing, will point the way to that 
coming race of pioneers who will set out to conquer these ice- 
locked vastnesses.^^ 

10 Ibid., p. 643. 

11 Charlotte Cameron : "A Cheechako in Alaska and Yukon,'' 
London, 1920, p. 292. 



APPENDIX 259 

Of course, she or any one can defend the description of 
Alaska as "iee-locked" by pointing out that there are some 
glaciers, especially near the southeastern corner of the terri- 
tory, and that several mountains have snow caps. Still, no 
one will seriously maintain that the presence of glaciers around 
Sitka or Juneau is reason for calling Alaska a land of ice- 
locked vastnesses. The reason is historical. We are merely 
making fair acknowledgment by our vocabulary to the ancient 
southern civilizations from which our ideas have descended 
to us. 

The experience of others confirms this. F. A. McDiarmid, 
describing the Yukon, finds it necessary to combat the old 
conceptions.^ 2 jje says: 

For countless ages all peoples have looked upon the north 
as a wild and barren land, the home of the iceberg and the 
storm. In the past few years it has been given to a favored 
few to learn that the Yukon is a land of beauty, of sunny 
days and clear skies. . . . 

The enchanting beauty of the wide-spreading Yukon valley 
— its glorious sunshine and its wealth of vegetation and fruit 
and flowers — comes as a great surprise to one who beholds it 
for the first time; and often causes the exclamation, "This can- 
not be the north." Indeed, it is not the north land of which 
we have read and thought perhaps to see. 



Other Factors Helping to Preserve the Tradition op 
THE North 

A set of reasons for the persistence of erroneous opinions 
about the North centers around the fact that many northern 
travelers have found it advantageous, for one reason or an- 
other, to perpetuate the idea of a land of desolation. Take, 
for instance, missionaries and explorers. 

12 F. A. McDiarmid: Determination of the 141st Meridian, The 
Journ. Royal Astronomical 8oc. of Canada, Vol. II, 1908, pp. 
84-95; reference on pp. 84 and 86. 



260 APPENDIX - 

Many travelers are hostile in their attitude towards mis- 
sionaries, saymg that they do far more harm than good in such 
places as China and Turkey, the interior of Africa, and the 
northern coast of Canada. I am not one of these. My 
opinion is that it would be a good thing for the Eskimos if they 
could be protected from our "civilization" as a whole. But 
if our civilization goes to them, as it is bound to do, I would 
be the last to say that the missionaries should not go wherever 
the trader and whaler and prospector go. I think the mis- 
sionaries help more than any other class of persons to temper 
to the shorn lamb the bitter wind of our civilization. 

The missionaries are doing important work, or at least a 
work which they think is important. To carry on that work 
with full efficiency they must have a great deal of money. 
They have found out by experience, and the missionary organi- 
zations here have found out, that there is nothing that opens 
our purses so readily as the belief that these devoted people 
have been undergoing great hardships in the Far North for 
the glory of the Kingdom. Accordingly, it is only exceptional 
missionaries who take pains to explain what easy and pleasant 
times they have in their remote fields of work. 

When lecturing recently in Indianapolis I was presented to 
the audience by a man who had written on certain aspects of 
Canadian and Arctic exploitation. In his introduction he as- 
sured me that whatever I might say in my lecture about the 
pleasant aspects of polar regions and the ease with which 
one could live there, he for one would never believe me and 
my audience would not. That is the beauty of being a polar 
explorer. You can go far away and do things that are easy 
to do, come back and say the country is friendly and the work 
pleasant, and still get credit for being a hero who must neces- 
sarily have gone through terrifying adventures in a region of 
utter desolation ! Furthermore, southerners do have real hard- 
ships in the North — real to them, at least — and when graph- 
ically related the hardships are admirably suited to keeping 



APPENDIX 261 

firm in our minds our inherited views of the dreaded polar 
regions. 

Stages in the Development of Arctic Exploration 

We get a different idea, however, when we read the history 
of Arctic exploration during the last three hundred years and 
trace the gradual emancipation from its terrors. At first the 
travelers were in such dread of the northern winter that they 
made only summer forays in ships, returning home in the 
autumn. In the second stage of arctic exploration they did 
pass the winter in the North, but practically in hibernation. 
It was a sort of trench warfare against the cold. They dug 
themselves in at the beginning of fall and managed to endure 
the tedium of winter through various devices, such as pub- 
lishing a newspaper or the teaching of school where the offi- 
cers were the masters and the sailors the pupils or various 
other occupations designed to kill time. In the spring they 
came out of their trenches in more or less trepidation and did 
what exploring was possible by their primitive methods during 
the spring and summer. As late as 1876 Sir George Nares 
declared that any polar explorer should be censured for cruelty 
who required his men to begin the work of exploration before 
April. 

But long before the time of Nares, such pioneers as Me- 
Clintock had begtin to emancipate themselves from the imag- 
ined terrors of the arctic winter. It was considered a great 
achievement, and was so in a certain sense, when they began 
to carry on sledge exploration under temperatures about the 
same as those at which children ordinarily go to school in 
winter in Manitoba and Dakota. 

Explorer after explorer made advances, and one by one the 
imagined difficulties of the North were conquered until finally, 
in the time of Peary, only one or two obstacles remained 
serioTis. He had emancipated himself so completely from the 



262 APPENDIX 

fear of the winter that he laid it down as a principle that all 
important exploratory sledge work should be done in winter 
and that the journeys ought to be over before the snow began 
to thaw appreciably in spring. He had devised a transporta- 
tion system which we still consider the best for those parts. 
The two ideas that remained uneonquered were that the polar 
sea is unnavigable ( it really still is except that it is everywhere 
sailable by submarines) and that the polar ocean is devoid of 
food or fuel resources, making it necessary to carry large 
quantities of both. Peary, himself, in his journey of four 
hundred miles from Cape Columbia to the North Pole, used 
about ten tons of food and fuel, all of which was exhausted 
before the journey was over. 

The idea that the polar regions are devoid of animal life 
has been the most stubborn of the misconceptions and now 
remains the only one of our inherited views that is held by 
many explorers and many geographers. The pristine polar 
regions survive only in the minds of the laity. ^ 



Erroneous Beliefs Regarding Animal Life in the Arctic 

When the pioneers came to the northern prairies, they were 
repelled by what was to them a great desolation. Sailors of 
southern seas were equally repelled by the ice-covered northern 
ocean. It was the theory of the landsman that whatever 
birds or animals might be in the North in summer would cer- 
tainly move south in winter. Equally, the sailors believed 
that the whales and seals and fishes found on the margin of 
the ice would go south in the fall (which is really the ease with 
the whale and the walnis) or would remain at the edge of the 
ice. It was thought that at no time of year would there be 
any considerable amount of animal life found in the sea be- 
neath the fairly permanent ice covering of especially that part 
of the polar ocean which lies around the Pole of Inaccessibil- 
ity — ^the center of the icy area, a point lying about four hun- 



APPENDIX 263 

dred miles from the North Pole, a few degrees east of the 
meridian of Bering Strait.^^ 

It is astounding how firm a hold these theories had on the 
early explorers. His whole record shows that Sir Edward 
Parry was about as truthful a man as ever lived. Honest as 
he was, he was unable to distinguish between theories which 
he held as unassailable and facts which he had actually ob- 
served, and so he tells us explicitly that the caribou and ovibos 
(musk' oxen) of Melville Island leave that island in the fall 
and go south, returning to it in the spring.^* We now know 
that neither the caribou nor the ovibos leave the island and go 
south. The ovibos stay in the island at all times, while the 
caribou do travel east and west at various times of year (not 
particularly in spring or autumn), going from Melville west 
to Prince Patrick and east to Bathurst Island. There are 
some also that go north and south between Melville Island 
and the islands to the north of that. This may happen at any 
time of year when the ice is sufficiently stable. There is no 
southward migration from Borden Island to Melville Island 
in the fall nor any northward migration in the spring, but 
merely an erratic movement between. Furthermore, this fact 
has no bearing on Parry's statement, which was to the effect 
that the animals moved south from Melville Island and came 
north to it in the spring, a thing that has never been observed 
and has doubtless never occurred in the case of ovibos and 
seldom or never in the case of caribou. 

When so reliable a man as Parry could make a definite but 
entirely unfounded statement about the absence of land ani- 
mals from Melville Island in winter, it does not seem partieu- 

isVillijalmur Stefansson: The Region, of Maximum Inacces- 
sibility in the Arctic, Geogr. Rev. Vol, X, 1920, pp. 167-172, and 
"The Friendly Arctic," pp. 8-11. 

14 "They arrived in Melville Island in the middle of May, 
crossing the ice from the southward, and quitted it on their re- 
turn towards the end of September" (A Supplement to The Ap- 
pendix of Captain Parry's Voyage for the Discovery of a North- 
West Passage, In The Years 1819-20, London, 1824, p. clxxxix). 



264 APPENDIX 

larly strange that other equally honest explorers, confusing 
accepted theory with observed fact, make definite statements 
to the effect that animal life is absent from the ocean to the 
north of Siberia or Alaska or Greenland. 

To begin with, the explorers who traveled over the ice on 
the polar ocean had inherited from their ancestors the view 
that these were regions devoid of animal life. Quite as im- 
portant is the fact that they came to the shores of the polar 
sea with the idea, which is held nearly universally, that primi- 
tive people, such as the Eskimos, are well-nigh infallible in 
their knowledge of the habits of the animals they hunt. They 
therefore took as fact what the Eskimos told them about seals 
being found only near land, assuming that these seal-hunting 
aborigines must know. Such an assumption should not be 
made. The Irish have been cultivating potatoes now for cen- 
turies, and still an Irish farmer will tell you things about the 
nature of the potato which you classify as simple superstition. 
Hundreds of generations of sailors have spent their lives on 
the sea and have discovered that the moon controls the weather, 
which it does not, and have failed to discover that the moon 
controls the tides, which it does. These things being so, need 
we suppose the Eskimos are infallible when they tell us about 
the habits of seals? 

Native Knowledge Not Infallible 

As has been said, the explorers appear to have come to the 
North with the idea that in this field the Eskimos were in- 
fallible. The Eskimos told the explorers that seals are found 
only near land, and this was taken not as the expression of a 
view but as the statement of a fact. When, at latitude 86° 
N., Peary eventually saw a seal in an open lead,'-^ this struck 
him and his Eskimo companions as remarkable (as he told me 
in conversation) and requiring special explanation. 

15 R, E. Peary, "The North Pole," New York, 1910, p. 250. 



APPENDIX 265 

The explorers, then, knew the absence of seals from the 
polar ocean far from land (a) through their inherited views, 
(&) through information from the Eskimos, (c) because they 
never saw them, and (d) because of the absence of polar 
bears which live on seals. It seems at first a reasonable assump- 
tion that if one animal's food is known to consist practically 
exclusively of another animal, then you would inevitably find 
the predatory animal wherever the food animal is abundant. 
This logic has the flaw that a beast of prey may succeed 
remarkably well under one condition and fail entirely under 
another. A well-known example is the snowy owl which lives 
on mice. In summer the owls prosper evei'ywhere in the 
polar regions because at that time the mice can be seen run- 
ning around on top of the ground. In winter the mice are 
still in the northern lands just where they were in summer 
but they are in their frozen holes or going around, mole- 
fashion and invisible to the owls, under the snow. It seems 
clear that owls do not suffer from the cold of the northern 
winter and that the only thing which drives them south in 
the fall is the coming of the snow, a condition that protects 
the mice (or lemmings). 

I am one of those who admire the cunning and prowess of 
the polar bear and believe that this animal has not as yet been 
given full credit by the animal psychologists for its com- 
parative rank in intelligence. However, I do not consider it 
a piece of extreme vanity to suppose that I have more brains 
than a polar bear, that I might be able to get seals in a place 
where bears fail utterly, and might prosper by hunting in a 
place where no bear could live. 

In this article I cannot go into the details of seal hunting 
as practiced by us out on that ocean which once was supposed 
to be devoid of seals. There is no novelty in the method we 
used. The only novelty is that we applied it in a region in 
which neither Eskimos nor explorers had considered applying 
it because of their inherited views to the effect that the seals 



266 APPENDIX 

were absent, and because they had iaferred the absence of 
the seal from the absence of bears and bear tracks. With a 
party from my expedition I traveled for two years in a region 
where we never saw a polar bear track, and still while travel- 
ing we lived mainly on seals which we were able to get from 
under the ice, where they would have been safe from the ut- 
most ingenuity of polar bears, even had the bears been 
there to look for them.i^ 



Conservatism Again a Hindrance to Discovert 

The man in the street has ideas of the North that are his 
because the recent advances of science have not been able to 
change the current of popular thought as it applies to the 
north polar regions. The scientists themselves, being victims' 
of their daily association with the average man and of the 
very vocabularies that have been built up under the influence 
of our old ideas about the North, have found it difficult to 
apply consistently to the deduction of correct views about the 
remote North their scientific principles evolved in southern 
latitudes. Had there never been a Mosaic cosmogony, with 
its six thousand years spanning all of human development, 
those might have been considered the most conservative geolo- 
gists and anthropologists who made the longest estimates of 
the period that man as man has existed upon the earth, for 
archeology shows that the bodily changes in man during the 
last seven thousand years have been slight, some say negligible. 
But it has been a fact in our day that those have been called 
conservative who have assumed or deduced the shortest pos- 
sible period of man's history on the earth. They have esteemed 

16 For methods of seal hunting, see Vilhjalmur Stefansson : "My 
Life With the Eskimo," pp. 108-111; and "The Friendly Arctic," 
pp. 171-172 and 301-310; idem, "Living Off the Country" as 
a Method of Arctic Exploration, Geogr. Rev., Vol. VII, 1919, 
pp. 291-310. 



APPENDIX 267 

it a sort of merit to make their conclusions conform to a cos- 
mogony which, as scientists, they had entirely discarded. 

There seems to be at present a similar tendency among 
authorities on the polar regions. Although the various sci- 
ences predispose us to make favorable conclusions about animal 
life in the North, we are still considered conservative in so 
far as We make our judgments conform, not to the principles 
of the sciences that apply, but to the views inherited from a 
superstitious ancestry. It has always been considered prob- 
able that great aggregations of animals might be found in 
the tropics or in the temperate zone. No serious doubts have, 
therefore, been cast upon estimates made in Africa or in 
the middle of North America about vast herds of grazing ani- 
mals, whether eland or bison. I do not recall that I have ever 
heard questioned even the most extravagant estimates of the 
size of buffalo herds. These estimates, however, do not rest 
upon any other sort of evidence than that which goes to show 
that caribou move in the arctic and subarctic regions in herds 
equally large — say a million animals. But so strong in the 
public mind is the presumption for the barrenness of the 
North that the very men who have seen the herds which they 
think contain a million, will admit their real estimates to you 
only in conversation and will print instead of their real views 
statements more "conservative." 

Similarly the oceanogTaphers who have found out that ani- 
mal life abounds at the margin of the ice make very guarded 
statements as to the probability of its extending under the ice. 
One by one we have already discarded nearly all of our former 
beliefs about the North. If in the case of any man we find 
nine statements of his to be lies, we incline to assume that the 
tenth is a lie also. In the case of the North, however, when 
we find our ideas one after another to be wrong, we still con- 
tinue to act on the principle that the remaining ideas are 
probably true and that they must not be canceled except 
through overwhelnoing evidence. 



268 APPENDIX 

Animal Life Proved Abundant in Parts of the Polar 

Ocean 

In my reasoning about the polar regions and in my work 
based on that reasoning I have treated the still-aceepted views 
about the North as I would the still-undisproved statements 
of a man whom I have found uniformly unreliable. I have 
traveled in the particular regions which Sir Clements Mark- 
ham selected to point out as devoid of animal lif e,^'^ and there 
I found animal life particularly abundant. Sir Clements was 
himself a distinguished geographer and arctic explorer and 
the intimate of most of the well-known explorers of the nine- 
teenth century, and yet he died believing the Beaufort Sea 
"lifeless." That was because every one up to that time had 
accepted the inherited view of arctic "barrenness" and no one 
had tried systematically to find animal life in the regions 
previously supposed to contain little or none. But we who 
since have tried have so far succeeded wherever we have tried. 
Should we then be intimidated into "conservative" adherence 
to old beliefs and assume that we have happened upon one 
favorable region after another and that somewhere else in the 
polar ocean there must exist at least a little remnant of the 
desolate polar regions that were once so extensive? Or should 
we say that since the applicable sciences know no principle 
according to which the rest of the polar ocean should be any 
more "devoid of animal life" than the pai'ts already shown to 
be abundantly supplied, the time has come at last to follow 
science and observation and to place the burden of proof upon 
any one who desires to maintain that there is somewhere a 
large part of the polar area that conforms to ancient views? 

As shown in my recent book "The Friendly Arctic ^^ and as 
previously brought out in my article "The Region of Maximum 
Inaccessibility in the Arctic," the area in the Arctic covered 

17 Sir Clements Markham, 'T,ife of Admiral Sir Leopold Mc- 
Clintock," London, 1909, p. 172. 

18 Pp. 8-11. 



APPENDIX 269 

with so much ice that it has till now remained unnavigated is 
not symmetrical, with the North Pole for a center, as seems 
to have been commonly assumed by those who supposed that 
the geogTaphic North Pole was one of the places devoid of 
animal life. The real center of the icy area lies in the direc- 
tion towards Alaska, at about latitude 83° 50' N., or 400 stat- 
ute miles from the North Pole. If the iciness of the ocean is 
the reason why animal life is assumed to be absent, then the 
assumed area of desolation should lie roughly in a circle which 
has the "Pole of Inaccessibility" rather than the North Pole 
for a center. If we reckon from that center, we have already 
found seals so near the Pole of Inaccessibility that the North 
Pole is no farther from it. There is, therefore, the same 
presumption for finding seals at the North Pole that there is 
for finding them where we have actually found them. 



Arctic "Deserts" Not Large 

As pointed out in the article to which we have just referred, 
we have found that certain areas of the polar ocean are better 
supplied with animal life than certain other areas. This 
merely corresponds to our general knowledge of the con- 
tinents and of the oceans. In any new land, in the sense in 
which North America was new four hundred years ago, the 
traveler who makes a long journey will find himself at one 
time in a region of more game and at another in a region of 
less. Similarly, the fishermen know that certain parts of the 
Atlantic are well supplied with cod and that in others the 
prospect of finding even one codfish is remote. From the 
point of view of animal life there are deserts on the con- 
tinents and in the warmer oceans, so why should there not be 
similar deserts in the polar ocean? Thus far we have never 
found these seal-less areas large. As we travel north we come 
into a district where there are less and less seals but, as we 
continue farther north, we come into another district where 



270 APPENDIX 

there are more and more seals. There appears, accordingly, 
no definite relation between the abundance of seals and 
latitude. 

Conclusion 

It cannot be considered proved that seal life is as abundant 
at the North Pole as at certain places where we have traveled 
depending for our food month after month on seals; but it 
appears to me we have carried our investigations and reason- 
ing on this subject so far that the burden of proof now rests 
on any one who assumes that there is a part of the polar ocean, 
whether the North Pole or any other part, that is devoid of 
animal life or where animal life is so scarce that a skilful 
hunter would find it difficult to secure food and fuel for a 
small party of men and dogs. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alaska — Reports of the various governors. Reports of the 
U. S. Geological Survey and of various other government 
bureaus. 

Barrows, EUrlan H. — "Geography of the Middle Illinois 
Valley" (University of Illinois, 1910). Especially perti- 
nent are pages 76-80 which deal with the difficulty the 
immigrants from wooded countries had in adapting them- 
selves to the Illinois prairies. 

Canada, Dominion of — Reports of the Departments of Agri- 
culture, Commerce, Immigration, Interior, etc. 

Chapman, Frank M. — "Distribution of Bird Life in Colombia" 
(Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 
Vol. 36, 1917). In this volume Dr. Chapman has a pre- 
liminary discussion of the evidence showing that life 
forms are more likely to move from hot into cool regions 
than from cool into hot. He has already written a much 
fuller discussion and this will probably be printed soon in 
some publication of the American Museum of Natural 
History. 

Grosvenor, Gilbert H. — "The Future of the Alaska Reindeer 
Industry," National Geographic Magazine, 1903. The 
prophecies of this article were considered ridiculously ex- 
travagant at the time, but have all come true — some twice 
over. 

Huntington, Ellsworth — "Civilization and Climate" (Yale 
University Press, New Haven, 1915). He has written 
many stimulating books and has been a pioneer in fruit- 
ful realms of investigation. The work most pertinent 
to our inquiry is the one mentioned above. 
271 



272 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Jackson, Sheldon — Biography by R. L. Stewart, Fleming H. 
Revell, New York, 1908. 

Lake, Simon — "The Submarine in War and Peace" (Lippin- 
cott, Philadelphia, 1918). Chapter VII is a discussion of 
under-ice navigation by a pioneer in this field. Some of 
the best information on this subject is not in print, and 
available only in semi-confidential conversation with sub- 
marine officers who operated among ice north of Russia 
and Scandinavia during the war. 

McAdie, Alexander George — "The Principles of Aerography" 
(Rand McNally, New York, 1917). Here you will find 
(slightly camouflaged by technical language) the why of 
such interesting facts as that the coldest place "on earth" 
is not high up in the air above either of the polar areas, 
but high up above the tropics ; and that early in July the 
north pole would be about as hot as the equator if it 
were on a low, level extensive land, remote from any 
large bodies of water or high mountains. McAdie is con- 
sidered one of the two or three leading authorities of 
the world on air temperatures. He is director of the 
Blue Hill Observatory, Readville, Mass. 

Nelson, Edward William — "The Eskimo About Behring 
Strait" (U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, 18th Annual Report, 
Washitigton, 1899), and many scientific articles. These 
have a bearing upon our argument here and there inci- 
dentally. Directly applicable is a report to him by 
ofiieers of the Biological Survey: "Reindeer in Alaska," 

Bulletin No. , U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, by 

Seymour Hadwen and Lawrence J. Palmer (in press). 

Powers, Harry Huntington — "America Among the Nations" 
(Macmillan, New York, 1918). In Chapter XII, "The 
Dependence of the Tropics," there is a clear statement 
of facts and arguments which lead to the conclusion 
that (whatever they may have been in the past) it is 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 273 

henceforth the probable destiny of tropic people to be 
dependent and tropic lands to be plundered. 

Rutherford, John Gunion — "Summary of the Report of 
the Royal Commission on the Reindeer and Musk Ox In- 
dustries." Dr. Rutherford's summary is ready for print- 
ing as this is written and will probably be published be- 
fore this book. Write for it to the Deputy Miaister, 
Department of the Interior, Ottawa. 

Stefansson, Vilhjalmur — "My Life with the Eskimo" (Mae- 
millan. New York, 1913), and "The Friendly Arctic" 
(Macmillan, 1921). These books give the basis of ex- 
perience and observation upon which stands the argu- 
ment of "The Northward Course of Empire." 

"Hunters of the Great North" is now in press and 
will be published by Harcourt, Brace & Co. (New York) 
the fall of 1922. It gives a picture of human and animal 
life in the Mackenzie delta and in northern Alaska. 

Storkerson, Storker T. — "Drifting in the Beaufort Sea" 
(MacLean's Magazine, Toronto, March 15 and April 1, 
1920; also reprinted in the Appendix to "The Friendly 
Arctic"). The pertinence of this story is in how it shows 
that Storkerson was comfortable tenting for six months 
on moving ice, and enjoyed it thoroughly. "For a greater 
reason" (as the geometry says) a man similarly con- 
stituted can be expected to enjoy life on the arctic 
prairies. 

Stuck, Archdeacon Hudson — Several instructive and delight- 
ful books about Alaska published by Charles Scribner's 
Sons. 

Sverdrup, Otto — "New Land" (London, 1904). Throughout 
these two volumes will be found many facts as to the 
kind of animal the ovibos is, and much indirect evidence 
to show its suitability for domestication. 



274. BIBLIOGRAPHY 

U. S. Bureau of Education, Department of the Inteeiob 
— Various reports dealing partly or wholly with the 
reindeer industry in Alaska. 

U. S. Department of Agriculture — Many reports dealing 
with agricultural experiment stations in Alaska. 

Ward, Robert de Courct — "Climate" (New York, 1908). A 
standard work on climatology. Has a bearing upon our 
argument similar to that of McAdie's "Principles of 
Aerography" (see above). 

This bibliography does not pretend completeness from 
any point of view. 



THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 

By VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 

To a world long shackled by unfounded and superstitious no- 
tions of the Polar regions, this explorer-scientist-philosopher- 
author returns from five years in the unknown North and brings 
a narrative to abolish Arctic heroics and open a new chapter in 
the progress of civilization. It is a tale of wonder and charm 
which will be a landmark among the proofs of the ultimate tri- 
umph of common sense. The story of the years 1913-18. 

Price $6.00. Pp. v-784, with maps. 

MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

By VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 

A book of adventure and sport with Indian and Eskimo told 
with skill and dry humor by the only explorer who has mastered 
the difficult Eskimo tongue. Exploration in untrodden lands, the 
thrill of new scenes, make this volume a continuous delight to a 
civihzation-bound reader, while the culminating discovery of the 
famous "Blond Eskimo" of mysterious origin (whom Stefansson 
calls the Copper Eskimo") achieves a dramatic climax rare in 
modem books of travel. The story of the years 1908-12. 

Price $6.50. Pp. vii-527, with maps. 

•^ u^ ^^ simply spell-bound with 'The Friendly Arctic' and find 
It hard to put it aside for the ordinary affairs of life." 

siE EDMUND WALKEE, President, Canadian Bank of Commerce. 

_ "I have just finished Tlie Friendly Arctic' and have found it 
incomparably the most engrossing book on Polar work I have 
ever read." 

E. GOSDON BILL, Dean, Dartmouth College. 

"Stefansson's work, taken as a whole, is one of the most nota- 
ble achievements of our times." 

PKOF. RAYMOND PEARL, Johns Hopkins University. 

"Stefansson proved that in the farthest Arctic the sea supplied 
food even more abundantly than the land . . . Unknown areas of 
vast extent have been explored and many illusions with respect 
^r t^'f^^ conditions have been dissipated. The results accom- 
plished by this expedition would have been impossible if Stefans- 
son had been a man of less resource and courage." 

SIR ROBERT BORDEN, Premier of Canada. 

PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

QQ Fifth Avenue NEW YORK 



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